God The Flesh and The Other From Irenaeus To Duns Scotus

God, the Flesh,
and the Other

God, the Flesh,
and the Other
From Irenaeus to Duns Scotus
Emmanuel Falque
Translated from the French by William Christian Hackett
northwestern university press

evanston, illinois
Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu
English translation copyright © 2015 by Northwestern University Press.

Published 2015. Originally published in French in 2008 under the title Dieu,
la chair et l’autre: D’Irénee à Duns Scot. Copyright © 2008 by Presses
Universitaires de France. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-P ublication Data
Falque, Emmanuel, 1963– author.

[Dieu, la chair et l’autre. English]
God, the flesh, and the other : from Irenaeus to Duns Scotus / Emmanuel
Falque ; translated from the French by William Christian Hackett.
pages cm
“Originally published in French in 2008 under the title Dieu, la chair et
l’autre: D’Irenee a Duns Scot. Copyright (c) 2008 by Presses Universitaires de
France.”
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-8101-3023-4 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8101-6816-9
(ebook)
1. Fathers of the church—History and criticism. 2. Christian literature,
Early—History and criticism. 3. Philosophy and religion—History. I. Hackett,
William Christian. II. Title.
BR67.F3513 2015
189.2—dc23
2014037055
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.4811992.
To my parents
Contents
Translator’s Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xix
Preface (2008) xxi
Preface to the English-Language Edition xxiii
Fons Signatus: The Sealed Source 3
Part One. God
Chapter 1
Metaphysics and Theology in Tension (Augustine) 25
Chapter 2
God Phenomenon (John Scotus Erigena) 47
Chapter 3
Reduction and Conversion (Meister Eckhart) 77
Part Two. The Flesh
Chapter 4
The Visibility of the Flesh (Irenaeus) 117
Chapter 5
The Solidity of the Flesh (Tertullian) 143
Chapter 6
The Conversion of the Flesh (Bonaventure) 167
viii Contents
Part Three. The Other
Chapter 7
Community and Intersubjectivity (Origen) 207
Chapter 8
Angelic Alterity (Thomas Aquinas) 231
Chapter 9
The Singular Other (John Duns Scotus) 255
By Way of Conclusion: Toward an Act of Return 279
Notes 285
Translator’s Foreword
Emmanuel Falque, dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Institut

Catholique de Paris, is both a philosopher and a theologian by training. He
passed his agrégation for philosophy in 1988, and then proceeded to receive
his canonical licentiate in theology in 1993. His philosophical Doctorat was
only subsequently conferred in 1998 (the habilitation in 2006). This dual spe-
cialization, effectively unique in France, stands out even to English-speaking
readers today as at least worthy of comment and probably seems a little
suspect to some: is the philosophical “specificity” (I do not say “purity”) of
the following work compromised in some way by the theological proficiency,
or worse, religious convictions, of the author? This question is of course a
microcosm of a historically important and controversial question regarding
the relationship of philosophy to theology and religion. The way we answer
this question, or, more importantly, our assumptions about it, determine our
understanding of philosophy itself in its task(s) and scope, and perhaps also
even our understanding of religion as well. As often is the case in intellectual
matters, and particularly matters with such far-reaching implications as this
one, it helps at least to try to avail ourselves of a broader frame of reference,
in relation to which our most “contemporary” discussions and debates may
suddenly appear all too narrow if not insular. For it could be the case that
the most compelling answer to the question may very well be the opposite
of what it implies (at least in the way I so pedagogically phrased it), even if,
or especially because, the theological always seems to press itself into every
nook and cranny of our thinking (concerning this, one only needs to think of
Heidegger himself, in relation to whom it is no longer all that controversial
to say that the Christian universe of ideas fundamentally shaped some of
his most basic concepts).1 It is in relation to this important lesson regarding
our philosophical and/or theological insularities, whether potential or actual,
that the present text has much to teach us, whether or not we share the “reli-
gious,” “theological,” or “philosophical” convictions of the author.
A historical observation, and then a biographical one, will suffice in order
to begin. First, the historical: we know that in an age long past, but which
nevertheless remains at the root of all of our thinking today, even if it was not
theologians who inhabited the faculty of arts where philosophy was taught,
it was nevertheless the case, even then, that theologians were philosophers (I
do not say necessarily “good” philosophers), at least in a rudimentary way—
and this not merely because they were all required to finish the course in
ix
x Translator’s Foreword
philosophy before entering theological studies itself. Theologians were phi-

losophers, and there was no contradiction whatsoever with the fact that they
were also theologians. Should it not give us pause that the best theologians
of the past were almost always the best philosophers (let us only mention
Aquinas and Scotus from the period with which we are dealing)? Even today,
the Jesuit “scholastic,” for example, pursuing his studies in what is no doubt
the most complete curriculum imaginable, begins with (at least) two years
in philosophy before proceeding to four in theology. Now the biographical
observation: what stands out in Falque’s case (a Catholic layperson) is that
he proceeded in a different manner altogether, from philosophy to theology
and then back again, from theology to philosophy. For good or ill, neither of
these disciplines can remain the same, once their insularity is shattered. Argu-
ably, this biographical detail (dismantling, from the beginning, a Hegelian
approach to the relation: the passage is not a “one-way street” and especially
not a matter of elevating the Vorstellungen, representations of religion into
the higher region of the Begriffe, of comprehension by the concept) can be
seen as an important symbol of Falque’s unique style of thought and even,
as it were, a cipher for the interpretation of his writings. I place it here at the
beginning of these brief orienting comments and which perhaps you can keep
in mind as you allow him to become your teacher by reading this book.
In any case, Falque’s specialization lies in this very medieval period to
which I have just alluded, particularly, though certainly not delimited to (if
the following pages are any indication) Saint Bonaventure.2 On top of that,
or rather, in some relation to it that you would perhaps like to understand
more clearly, he is a philosopher in the school of phenomenology. There is,
for him, no contradiction between these two or three fundamental orienta-
tions of his thought: the historical, philosophical, and theological. I say “two
or three” because for evident reasons the “historical” dimension of his spe-
cializations can just as easily be seen as the unique condition for his approach
to his central methodological question, of perpetual concern: the relation of
philosophy and theology in today’s context. From the historical vantage, his
dual specialization in medieval and modern thought means that their juxta-
position sheds special light on the question, which, as the following pages
show again and again, is a light that shines in both directions: we understand
the medieval (or patristic) period(s) more clearly when we recognize that
the questions we pose today were very much theirs also (though, of course,
uniquely so), and we understand ourselves more clearly when we find that
our most radical ways of questioning already find anticipations in that era,
anticipations that from time to time advance beyond our own thinking, often
reinvigorate it, and even critique it (if, of course, we are willing to listen).
Such is the argument of the present book in relation to three themes, as
the title suggests: “God,” the “flesh,” and the “other.”3 This is a book, then,
about the relevance of the past for the present, about the “contemporaneity”
of patristic and medieval thought to our own most pressing philosophical
Translator’s Foreword xi
questions—even if, or especially because, their thinking is theological and

religious and hence philosophical in a unique manner. There is no need to
elaborate on the contents of the book in this introduction. Let me simply note
for you that the three grand themes shared by the past and present compose
the three parts of the book, and the three parts have three chapters each, and
each chapter focuses on a specific thinker, either from the patristic period (in
the order of their appearance: Augustine, chap. 1; Irenaeus, chap. 4; Tertul-
lian, chap. 5; Origen, chap. 7) or from the Middle Ages (Erigena, chap. 2;
Eckhart, chap. 3; Bonaventure, chap. 6; Aquinas, chap. 8; Scotus, chap. 9).
The point that I would like to express for the sake of this introduction is
minimal: that it is probably not misleading at all to assert that the whole of
Falque’s thought can be fruitfully conceived as taken up with demonstrat-
ing the very exclusive non-contradiction that I just mentioned: theology and
philosophy, though irreducible, are not necessarily opposed, but can work
together, reciprocally becoming the means toward advancing each other’s
proper inquiry. How does this demonstration work? First, it is clearly not
merely a matter of some minimalist argument for the possibility of a work-
ing arrangement between estranged partners. Instead, it is first a matter of
“doing” the relation for which he argues, “showing” that it works by its
fruit. As they still like to say in classrooms and dissertations everywhere, the
argument is “performative,” though in the second place there are significant
pauses in the text that reflect on the progress made in the performance (see
especially the introductory sections of each part, as well as the conclusion).
Let us step back from this question of demonstration toward two com-
plementary vantage points that together will afford as broad a survey of
the terrain as possible. (1) From the phenomenological point of view, first,
the mutual reciprocity of philosophy and theology is derived from the
straightforwardly philosophical conviction that there is no domain forbid-
den to phenomenological description, since every appearing has the right
to be described. Second, and as a direct consequence of this conviction, the
observation arises that the theological kind of phenomena are often (if not
paradigmatically) the most important, or at least most challenging, pre-
cisely by the “radicality” of their appearing, that is, their appearing in such
a manner as always to break apart and refigure our anticipative grasp of
them, dissolving the conditions by which we can conceive ourselves as grasp-
ing them—in short, their “nothing greater” (to allude to Anselm) or “ever
greater” (to allude to the Fourth Lateran Council’s critique of Joachim of
Fiore) character. This general perspective, which marks, on my reading, the
two fundamental emphases of what was denominated about two decades
ago as the “theological turn,” should not be new to any of us now. Falque
works wholly from within the “renaissance” of phenomenology in France of
which the “theological turn,” or more adequately (though less attractively)
described, the philosophical turn to theological phenomena, is a central tra-
jectory but in no way the sole course taken.4 This is not to say that Falque is a
xii Translator’s Foreword
carbon copy of his teachers and forebears in the—forgive me—philosophical

turn to theological phenomena of French phenomenology (Levinas, Ricoeur,
Lacoste, Marion, Henry, Chrétien, et al.). His particular “position,” like all of
theirs, stands on its own two legs and is marked by its own unique emphases.
I will only mention here his most striking distinction: the rejection of his
teachers’ Heideggerian malaise toward “metaphysics.” For Falque, keeping
metaphysics in play is actually a requisite, the very difficulty and danger of
which is a virtue, for theological (and philosophical) thinking, as the first
chapter of the present work, on the “tension of metaphysics and theology”
in Saint Augustine, powerfully elaborates. (2) From the theological point of
view, second (here), it means, simply, that the theological is open to the theo-
logical import of non-theological domains: if we better understand what the
philosophers say about our finitude or our flesh, might we then be able to
understand perhaps a little better the theological conception of the human
being as destined for the resurrection of the flesh? The answer of course is
crystal clear. To take an example developed partially in the present text (part
II, chaps. 4–6) and elsewhere in Falque’s oeuvre (e.g., Métamorphose de la
finitude),5 belief in the resurrection of the flesh can be illuminated (and, often
fruitfully, challenged) by, for example, Husserl’s distinction between objec-
tive “body” and subjective “flesh” (and its developments in Merleau-Ponty,
Henry, etc.). As Falque says apothegmatically in the preface to the English
edition of the text just mentioned: “The more we do philosophy, the better
the theology.”6
More difficult to swallow for many would be the reciprocal, and, if we
are honest, perfectly compelling assertion that the data of belief, here, the
resurrection of the flesh (a dogma no less) is itself illuminative for—and yes,
fruitfully challenging to—philosophical reflection on human finitude. Stick-
ing with this example, the fact remains, as Michel Henry wrote decades ago,
that whatever the “radicality” of philosophical finitude, say, in Nietzsche or
Heidegger, the dogma itself appears as a radical affirmation of the finitude of
the flesh, and one that proposes itself as more radical than a non-dogmatic,
or rather, non-theological (for it is perhaps, at this level, always a matter
of some dogma or another) conception.7 Theology, philosophy, and even
historical studies (inasmuch as it contains living philosophies and theolo-
gies, often presupposing them for its very intelligibility) are together engaged
in a mutual investigation, which, by virtue of the (seemingly) incongruous
collaborators involved, may both expand and even renovate each of their
self-understandings. This expansion and renovation is a result of the phe-
nomena studied. Such is the risk—fidelity to the phenomena, no matter the
consequences for our certainties—that Falque requires these disciplines to
take. And it is through undertaking this risk that we come to find that the
medieval period is then much like our own, at least insofar as our think-
ing occurs after the advent of phenomenology and in its wake: here where
the philosophical and theological marshal their forces for the sake of an
Translator’s Foreword xiii
adequate approach to the “object(s)” they are asked to study and are mutually
refigured.
It is this very tension and risk, then, that marks the drama of Falque’s
work, and especially the pages of God, the Flesh, and the Other. Its driving
conviction is in the first place that this tension between the philosophical
and theological, where all is risked for the sake of fidelity to the phenomena
investigated, is the source of the greatest theological and philosophical fruit.
What we are dealing with here, then, is a philosophy of which its very (if I can
say it) philosophicity is defined by its openness to and hence irreducible ten-
sion with the theological and hence a theology, the very theologicity of which
is measured by its willingness to expose itself to the trial of the philosophical.
The final hermeneutic of Falque’s methodology, to which I would like to
draw your attention here, concerns what I see as an eschatological undercur-
rent to his work, an undercurrent that, I suggest, creates the conditions for
the theological intensification of the philosophical, in particular, the historical
conditions of human finitude, including our materiality. This undercurrent
is made explicit as a fundamental argument of his recent work Les noces de
l’Agneau (2011), according to which the Christian notion of body, particularly
in its destiny (as we proleptically taste it in the Eucharist and in the marriage
bed), is a radical embrace of our material and animal conditions with which
philosophy is currently concerned.8 Let me develop this here, however, in
relation to the Augustinian recognition of the necessity of metaphysics for
theology broached above, since it serves as the first doorway of the pres-
ent book: an important result of Augustine’s “Trinitarian” transformation of
Aristotle’s categories is that the accusation, for Falque, of “onto-theo-logy”
becomes “impossible,” not only because of its historical “inaccessibility” (that
is, to an approach by way of the “history of ideas,” since the sources are
themselves much more complicated than the “Heideggerian” philosophical
narrative told and retold today) but also because it is refused precisely by the
very “insoluble tension” between the metaphysical and the theological that
God’s “entrance” into the horizon of human reflection demands. Metaphys-
ics is here much less “overcome” than it is transfigured from within. It seems
for Falque, therefore, that every attempt to be done once and for all with
metaphysics is, as it were, an “over-realized” eschatology (that is, insofar as it
attempts, by its own power, to resolve the native “tension” of the encounter
between metaphysics and the theological within the limits of our historical
conditions, which makes it impossible). Such an “over-realized” thinking (1)
seeks to think, in the theological domain, God in himself without reference to
his acts ad extra, and therefore without the categories that “metaphysics” pro-
vides, and in the philosophical domain, seeks to think the radical finitude of
creaturely being apart from revelation, although the thought of revelation, in
actuality, by means of an irreducible tension, only pushes historicity, finitude,
and the philosophical further than they can go on their own. It is therefore,
finally, (2) ultimately an a priori refusal of the innate capacity of created being
xiv Translator’s Foreword
to receive and even anticipate (however paradoxically) the grace of divine

Being in the entrance of God into history and therefore human thought. The
tension is upheld therefore by an appropriate eschatological conception of
the human, which draws the lines and limits of human finitude—including
historicity and materiality—all the more concretely.
This undercurrent, however, remains for the most part unarticulated in the
present work. For the sake of understanding more clearly its setting within
the scope of Falque’s aims and fundamental “project,” a brief juxtaposition
with another oeuvre of another thinker, Hans Urs von Balthasar, may be
illuminative. In the conclusion to the fifth volume of his seven-volume Theo-
logical Aesthetics (III/2 in the original German edition), Balthasar reflects on
the work accomplished in the two-part study of “The Realm of Metaphysics
in Antiquity (vol. 4) and the Modern Age (vol. 5)” (III/1–2). Here Balthasar
famously suggests, with the last words of his text, and at the end of a long,
critical conversation with Heidegger, that, after all, the Christian is “the
guardian of metaphysics for our time.”9 According to Balthasar, religious faith
does not constrict philosophical questioning by posing “ready-made answers
from revelation” in advance, but rather itself actually creates the possibility
for a more “open” questioning precisely because the believer “believes in the
absolute love of God” and is therefore “obliged to understand Being in its
ontological difference as pointing to love” as its source, a love that increases
the perception of the mystery of Being since it has no ground but itself in its
absolute freedom.10 It is at least an analogous advancement on Heidegger
which drives the texts of Emmanuel Falque.11 Faith (and its content) is no
inhibition to philosophical inquiry, but is rather an “attitude” that serves as
a powerful condition for it. If Falque is, to be sure, less concerned directly
with “the question of the meaning of Being” than Balthasar and Heidegger,
he is all the more concerned with the paths in which such questioning has
opened up in today’s context, for example, with the themes of “materiality”
or “alterity” (pts. II and III of the present text), or of finitude and mortality
found elsewhere in his oeuvre.
Now allow me briefly to introduce a fuller picture of this elsewhere. Falque
is the author of what he calls a “philosophical triduum,” which itself is a case
in point for what I put forward here. Like the present work it brings into con-
versation the theological and philosophical domains, exposing their “point(s)
of contact,” particularly the place(s) where philosophical and theological
data mutually inform one another, precisely because of their irreducibility
and tension between them. The volumes of this “triduum” follow, themati-
cally, the central mysteries of the Christian faith, and which themselves grow
out of the critical moments at the historical dénouement of Christ’s minis-
try on earth: his institution of the Eucharist on Holy Thursday, his passion
(from his anguish in the garden on the eve of his death to his crucifixion)
on Good Friday, and his resurrection on Easter Sunday. These books are, in
the order of their appearing, Passeur de Gethsémani, Angoisse, souffrance et
Translator’s Foreword xv
mort: Lecture existentielle et phénoménologique (1999), Métamorphose de

la finitude: Essai philosophique sur la naissance et la résurrection (2004),
and Les noces de l’Agneau: Essai philosophique sur le corps et l’eucharistie
(2011). As their titles make plain, these books assume Falque’s familiar man-
ner of proceeding: taking up a thematic dear to contemporary Continental
philosophy (death, finitude, and flesh) and setting them beside correspond-
ing, perennial themes in theology (the suffering of Jesus, the resurrection,
and the Eucharist) in order to bring about both a dilation or widening of
the philosophical questioning and a new illumination of the theological. The
work of Falque’s text is accomplished out of a determined inhabitation of
the juxtaposition, which often exposes the fact that philosophical inquiry is
concluded too hastily (see, in the following pages, Falque’s judicious critiques
of Heidegger, as well as Marion, Henry, and others). The determined inhabi-
tation shows theology’s own tendency to close the inquiry too quickly as well
(Falque does not spare criticisms from this vantage of many of the major
figures studied in this book).
Manifest most clearly (and perhaps controversially) in the philosophi-
cal triduum is what we can only call a “Christological concentration” of
philosophy. From this perspective, the philosophy at the dawn of the new
millennium is only catching up to theology of the twentieth century, which
was marked if not defined by such a concentration. But is this reading of the
situation really the case? The introduction of the name of Xavier Tilliette, the
great French specialist in Schelling, would at least give us pause. He is the
notorious author of a number of books that seek to explicate a “philosophi-
cal Christology” (and if there is, indeed, such a discipline as “philosophical
theology,” then why not?). Among these texts of his are the following titles:
La Christologie idéaliste (1986), La semaine sainte des philosophes (1992),
Le Christ des philosophes (1993), Les philosophes lisent la Bible (2001),
L’eglise des philosophes (2006), and Philosophies eucharistiques (2006).
The significance of Tilliette’s work for our present concern is that he shows
almost encyclopedically how modern philosophy, from Descartes to Mar-
cel to Marion (and in some precursors, for example, Nicholas of Cusa), has
been perpetually, if not maniacally, concerned with theological themes. In
Hegel and Schelling, in Kierkegaard and Rosenzweig, to mention some of
the most profound figures, the philosophical is not merely philosophical, but
also, at the same time, quite comfortably doing what in other cases we are
all happy to call theology (if it is still right to talk of “theology” in the case
of Rosenzweig’s Jewish thought): rather, in all these cases—and well before
the “theological turn”—it is revelation that sets before philosophy its highest
and most demanding task.12 Questions about the orthodoxy of, say, Hegel’s
“speculative Good Friday,” and even about the nature of the theology itself
that is employed (is it philosophy and theology at once?) are secondary. The
point is that revelation has specifically philosophical import in his case (and,
it turns out, in many others).
xvi Translator’s Foreword
The work of Tilliette, though less influenced by phenomenology than Ger-

man idealism, may be seen as an approximate precursor to Falque’s own
work.13 What is distinct, perhaps, in Falque’s work vis-à-vis Tilliette is that,
like others today in France, for him it is phenomenology in particular that
is seen as the best means toward, on the one hand, illuminating the native
intelligibility of theological phenomena (unlike Tilliette, Falque is neither
developing a “philosophical Christology” nor a “philosophy of revelation”).
And on the other hand, such a phenomenology open to the theological also
carries the conviction that theological phenomena, as a constitutive element
within their own luminosity, propose themselves as paradigm cases of intel-
ligibility in general. The theological is then necessary for any (relatively)
complete or coherent philosophy.14 Yet Falque’s distinction from his fellow
phénoménologues is found particularly in what I have called above his man-
ner of “determined inhabitation” of the juxtaposition of philosophy and
theology regardless of the degrees of pressure sustained at their “point of
contact.” His particular incarnation of the phenomenological task opens up,
perhaps, a new domain, or at least inhabits the dual domains of philosophy
and theology in a new way, an inhabitation which cannot be simply reduced,
as I mentioned above, to a “theological turn” shared by a set of French think-
ers. Though the latter nomination can be helpful as a first approach—and
let us pause to thank Dominique Janicaud—it nevertheless quickly becomes
inadequate and with Falque we can see perhaps most clearly why: the theo-
logical domain becomes necessary for the integrity of philosophy itself (the
reverse, again, is less controversial, and has almost always been: theologians
seem to have a tradition of being more open in this regard . . .).
If we had to confer on Falque a motto (at the risk of being a little mislead-
ing, unless we keep in mind that it is a motto) it would be irreducibly double:
if in Falque there is “faith seeking understanding,” at the same time there is
“understanding seeking faith.” If theological phenomena can be approached
philosophically, then philosophical phenomena can be approached theologi-
cally. It is the former that Falque emphasizes for the sake of our contemporary
context. The fact that these two modes of approach, on the one hand, occur
through a rhythm of reciprocal exchange, or, to borrow from Merleau-Ponty,
as an “interlacement,” but also, on the other hand, that at moments they
occur, however strangely, at the same time, and in a way that precludes a
final determination in their regard, is precisely the point Falque wants us to
understand: it is a determining element of our finitude (radicalized by what I
named above the underlying eschatology of Falque’s thinking) that we cannot
make a final judgment between them. Fidelity to “the things themselves” of
phenomenology demands this forfeiture of a final judgment regarding their
ultimate provenance, or, more reservedly, at least regarding their relation to
what we differentiate as the philosophical and theological domains—for the
time being, that is, in the midst of what we understand as our (present) human
condition. The fact is that we do not know if we know the whole meaning
Translator’s Foreword xvii
of our humanity, and this un-knowledge becomes the condition for a special
kind of inquiry that joins the philosophical with the theological, and which
is marked by, to borrow an appropriate term from Jean-Luc Marion, “cer-
titudes négatives,” where the impossibility of a complete and final judgment
regarding some phenomena (such as God, or the flesh or alterity) itself bears
a unique epistemic force that draws philosophy into its profundity.15 Falque’s
“determined inhabitation” has perhaps been sufficiently enough explained
to orient your reading of this masterful text, which will illustrate further, or
better, “perform,” what I mean to say here.
Finally, a note on the current English-language literature related to Falque
before the necessary comments on the translation itself. Besides the present
work and Metamorphosis of Finitude, other representative works of Falque’s
in English are a few articles16 and a far-ranging interview in a book entitled
Quiet Powers of the Possible.17 Finally, Crina Gschwandtner has dedicated
a chapter of her Postmodern Apologetics? (2013) to Falque’s oeuvre;18
she has also penned an article on his philosophy of corporeality (2012).19
Gschwandtner’s reflections fill out some important aspects of what I only
gloss over here; they would serve any reader well as supplementary reading
to the following text.
Regarding the translation: like any translation, great or small, this one
presented some of its own difficulties that the translator had to decide how
best to navigate. Translator’s notes are set off from Falque’s own by brack-
ets: these most often explain the methodology of citation that I used when
converting Falque’s French into my English rendering. Perhaps it is worth
stating the general rule here. Falque again and again quotes and modifies
standard French translations of the primary authors who are the focus of
each chapter. Therefore, in consultation with the French or original-language
text to which he refers as well as with the standard English-language trans-
lations, I was typically compelled to translate Falque’s French rendering
itself into English. In the case, therefore, of his quotation and modification
(slight or major) of the French translations of Greek or Latin sources, I pro-
vide reference to the original source (often, but not always, the celebrated
Sources chrétiennes series) and retain his acknowledgment of modification
in parentheses. However, I retained this methodology only for the primary
author who serves as the focus of each chapter. Regarding all other sources
quoted and cited, which are mainly modern sources, I found the English-
language equivalent—if there was one—and used it instead of proffering my
own translation of the French (or German) text. Dieu, la chair et l’autre is,
to say the least, a lively text in French, marked by a certain characteristic
breathlessness natural to a unique style of thinking that is as rich as it is freely
unencumbered by anything but its very task. This style of thinking is always
ambitiously unfolding a little more before stopping suddenly, looking up,
surveying the field in order then to look back down, and then abruptly start-
ing again from a fresh angle of attack. The reader is required to embrace this
xviii Translator’s Foreword
style or risk getting seasick, thereby trusting that their guide—philosopher-

theologian-medievalist—busier than a bee, is hard at his work producing
something as unique, idiosyncratic, even sui generis as honey. The translation
strives, simply, to be faithful to this style and its results.
I would like to thank the author himself for entrusting me with this mas-
sive project, as well as for his indefatigable generosity, especially during my
original sojourn in Paris while still a doctoral student, under the pretext of
pensionnaire étranger at the École Normale Supérieure. It was then, in 2010,
that I began this project, which has been a constant companion since, not
only while writing my dissertation in Paris and Charlottesville, but also dur-
ing the inaugural year, and now a little more, at my first academic post in
Melbourne. For the translation of the first chapter, I consulted, and benefited
from, Joeri Schrijvers’s translation of a slightly different version of a consid-
erable portion of it.20 Heartfelt thanks also are due to Genevieve Fahey for
her expert proofreading services. I would finally like to thank Marianne for
so often pushing me out of bed while it was still dark in order to make this
translation a reality. If the translator may be granted the space to dedicate his
labors here, then may they be to her honor. This is only right since we have
her most of all to thank for the completion of this text, but also, as you can
surmise, for any mistakes it contains . . .
William Christian Hackett

Acknowledgments
The present work was first written for a postdoctoral degree (Habilitation
à diriger des recherches [HDR]) undertaken at the University of Paris IV
(Sorbonne), on Saturday, June 10, 2006, with the result of the awarding of
the title of professor. I would like to thank the members of the committee,
who were, in order of priority: R. Imbach (University of Paris IV, Sorbonne,
director), J.-L. Marion (University of Paris IV, Sorbonne), J. Greisch (Catholic
Institute of Paris), P. Capelle (Catholic Institute of Paris), O. Boulnois (École
Pratique des Hautes Études), G. Ferretti (University of Macerata, Italy). The
completion of this work would not have been possible without the constant
support of my associates, colleagues, and students at the Catholic Institute
of Paris. May you all be here gratified for having made implicit contribu-
tions to this work. Let me offer my profound gratitude to J. Alexandre and
J. de Gramont for having read over the entire volume—without omitting, of
course, J.-L. Marion who, besides welcoming this book into his prestigious
collection, has never belied either his friendship or his confidence toward me.
xix
Preface (2008)
The audacious claim with which this book opens and the wager on which it
is based is this: it is possible today to read the church fathers and the medie
vals philosophically—up to and including the corpus of theology. Certainly,
we have not been waiting on phenomenology in order to interrogate the
corpus of theology with renewed effort, nor, for that matter, patristic and
medieval texts in order to discover in them new bearings for phenomenology.
It remains, however, that from patristic and medieval philosophy to phenom-
enology the relation is decisive and even exemplary. We could surely point out
that the Thomism of Franz Brentano was at the root of Husserlian intention-
ality, that the young Martin Heidegger began his career with a habilitation
on The Treatise on the Categories and Signification in Duns Scotus (or rather
Thomas d’Erfurt) (1915) before planning a course never given on The Philo-
sophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism (1918–1919), that Max Scheler
was not indifferent to the Nature and the Form of Sympathy in the “Canticle
of Creatures” of friar Francis (1923), that Edith Stein attempted an “essay
of confrontation” between The Phenomenology of Husserl and the Philoso-
phy of St. Thomas Aquinas (1929), and that Hannah Arendt’s project would
remain totally incomprehensible without The Concept of Love in Augustine
(1929) and her analyses of medieval philosophy in The Life of the Spirit
(published posthumously).
But within the “way” that we want to initiate here, there exist more and
better options, or rather, as it were, another way. We will not be content, in
this work, with sounding out the patristic and medieval roots of phenome-
nology—a work today largely accomplished (A. de Muralt, D. Perler, J.-L.
Solère, J. D. Caputo, etc.)—but we will practice phenomenology from within
the corpus of theology, in order to show what neither of them, perhaps, have
yet been able to see: the ultimate possibility of phenomenologically describ-
ing the modes of manifestation of theology, up to and including the lived
experience internal to the texts of the tradition in order to (re)discover it
again today. Independently of their efficacy, theologoumena are translated
into a number of philosophemes that phenomenology could and ought
legitimately to interrogate: relation and substance in the Trinity and onto-
theology (Augustine), theophany and appearance of the phenomenon (John
Scotus Erigena), detachment and reduction (Meister Eckhart), creation of
Adam and visibility of the flesh (Irenaeus), Christological incarnation and
density of the body (Tertullian), conversion of the senses and incorporeity
xxi
xxii Preface (2008)
(Bonaventure), communion of saints and genesis of the community (Origen),

treatise on angels and intersubjectivity (Thomas Aquinas), call of the name
and singularity of the other (Duns Scotus).
In both cases, as in every case, it is not at all a question either of juxta-
posing the terms without showing the possibility of co-engendering them
(reduction to God, constitution of the flesh, genesis of alterity), or of requir-
ing belief in the revealed in order to give free rein to its act of manifestation
(imperative of the epochê). The method or the way (meta è hodos) is always
worth more than the result, if indeed we allow ourselves to carry it out. This
is how we would want to attain our “phenomenological practice of medieval
philosophy,” here justified only through its practice. The concepts of God, the
flesh, and the other belong, in a certain and exemplary fashion, to the field
of contemporary phenomenology, but in the corpus of patristic and medieval
philosophy they find that which not only grounds them but also renews them.
Profunda fluviorum scrutatus est, et abscondita produxit in lucem: “He
has scrutinized the depth of the waters and has brought to light that which
was hidden” (Job 28:11). What is true here of theology (Bonaventure) is even
more so of philosophy, and in particular of phenomenology, for which the
perscrutatio—the act of “sounding out” or of “descending into the depths”—
defines the gesture, as well as the risk, of setting out from there. This work
desires to chronicle the attempt of this setting out, entrusting to others the
task of returning to its results and developing them.
Preface to the English-Language Edition
I consider it both a tall order and a personal challenge to release this work
of medieval philosophy, of phenomenology (and of philosophy period) into
the hands of the Anglo-Saxon and American public. It is a tall order because
it wants to open up a new way of practicing medieval philosophy in our day.
And it is a personal challenge because this mode of philosophizing aspires to
revive for us a past that one would be forgiven for believing long dead. God,
the Flesh, and the Other steers a course across the disciplines and through
very distinct ways of writing, studying, and thinking. What matters here is
not knowing from where one speaks, nor even “who” is doing the speaking.
For the text, navigating a course with numerous “crossings” is as surprising
in its detours as it is unexpected in its discoveries. This holds I think for each
chapter, which stands on its own. Yet together they form a unified whole.
It has been thought that everything has been said that could be said about
Saint Augustine, yet there is revealed a tension of metaphysics and theology
that is no longer content (once the blind habit is broken) with the much too
famous and insufficient “overcoming of metaphysics.” It also seemed that the
question of the phenomenon was a discovery of the twentieth century, or at
least the eighteenth, yet its hidden roots are found in the Carolingian era, in
the ninth century, in John Scotus Erigena’s notion of theophany. It was also
thought that Mary was superior to Martha in the episode at Bethany, yet
the surprising thing is, following Meister Eckhart, that only Martha lives “in
the mode of reduction” with God within, whereas Mary her sister always
remains in the “natural attitude,” in a presence so objectifying of the divine
that she only stands there over and against it.
It could even appear that the question of the body is today something
new. But the fathers prove the contrary. Because philosophy forgot it in the
first place it failed to return to it. The “visibility” of the flesh in Irenaeus and
its “solidity” in Tertullian reveal in fact the density of the body, prohibiting
thereby every form of gnosis, certainly in philosophy and theology, but also,
specifically, in phenomenology (through the encounter with Michel Henry in
particular). Even better, only a serious consideration of the incarnation of man
as well as God expects of us a true “conversion of the senses” so that (following
Bonaventure) we finally cease fleeing from our humanity in order to take refuge
in the divine. Because we all experience the death of our loved ones, suffering
the pain of that separation, Origen via Saint Bernard teaches us that the space
of the communion of saints does not signify another world, but another way of
xxiii
xxiv Preface to the English-Language Edition
living in the same world. Our beloved dead have not simply disappeared, but
are held in the Word and experience our feelings, our joys and pains.
The interrogation of alterity is not so new either. Thomas Aquinas allows
us to demonstrate this in his analysis of the relation of one angel to another.
And following his indications we discover today a way of thinking human
interrelationality. This is why we will not be satisfied any longer with a char-
acterization of alterity that is too universalized, admittedly characteristic of
Judaism (Levinas for example) but not Christianity. Duns Scotus is not inter-
ested in this sense, nor first, in the singular character of the rock or blade of
grass, simply for philosophical or dialectical reasons, as is often so wrongly
suggested. The vocation of the singular man, in the call made to each (and in
particular to the disciples), provides the highest justification for returning to
singularity in the problem of alterity. Once again, it is by forgetting a theo-
logical motive behind a philosophical thesis that the root of the problem was
forgotten yesterday, and today, even its meaning.
God, the Flesh, and the Other therefore makes the decision to return to
a patristic and medieval tradition often wholly uninterrogated or studied in
such a historical fashion that it becomes far too distant from us. The fruitful
and necessary work of the historians of philosophy certainly delivers pre-
cious material which feeds the work of thought. In order to reflect on this
material today the fact remains that it must be given meaning in our contem-
porary situation without at the same time reducing it to a mirror image of
ourselves. There is a virtue to progressing slowly in relation to that which we
have only too often forgotten by dint of traveling intellectual routes too often
frequented (including within the practice of reading). The “phenomenologi-
cal practice of medieval philosophy” undertaken here designates neither a
method nor an intellectual fashion. Rather, it wants to attain to a new way
of seeing and of living in the world—certainly of today, but also of yesterday,
for the sake of learning how to think otherwise, and to make us the worthy
successors of those who have preceded us.
This book, translated into English and thereby handed over to the Anglo-
American public, is certainly inscribed within the famous “theological turn
of French phenomenology” (Levinas, Ricoeur, Marion, Henry, etc.). But
actually it by and large surpasses it. What matters is neither to stand one’s
ground among a distribution of disciplines nor to brandish interdictions. I
have demonstrated this elsewhere. The time has come to “cross the Rubicon”
and to discover new boundaries between philosophy and theology. Where
it has previously been wrongly thought sufficient to interpret theology phe-
nomenologically, today I call for a “return shock” of theology back onto
philosophy itself. The Metamorphosis of Finitude (now published in English)
is not simply the title of my book on birth and resurrection, but properly
speaking a “method” through which no apprenticeship to the tradition can
be undertaken without becoming completely transformed in one’s convic-
tions in the process.1
Preface to the English-Language Edition xxv
I am grateful to the translator, Chris Hackett, for taking on this task and
to Northwestern University Press for making it possible. One does not climb
up the hills and into the mountains in order to reach the heights without
a lot of hard work. This certainly involved a high level of skill. But only
a real empathy with what is expressed and an unfailing fidelity made pos-
sible by a common bond of friendship is the justification of such labors:
to cause to pass truly from one language into another what is otherwise
hidden behind undecipherable hieroglyphs. Chris—and his wife, who also
carried the burden—have my profound gratitude, now leaving the reader
with the leisure to accomplish the crossing for him-or herself. Arriving at the
summit one can contemplate the plain and see there the place that everyone
has taken during the trip: Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, Erigena, Bonaventure,
Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Meister Eckhart become . . . as though our
contemporaries.
Emmanuel Falque
Mettray, September 2013
God, the Flesh,
and the Other
Fons Signatus: The Sealed Source
Is phenomenology a jack-of-all-trades [bonne à tout faire]—or better, the

jack-of-all-trades? The question is not new, even though a certain phenom-
enon of “modality” makes a case for its absolute novelty, however outdated
it may seem. Max Scheler, in the preface of the second edition of Vom Ewigen
im Menschen, already calculated the danger in 1922: “Phenomenology, as
method of a descriptive theory of views of the world, is a jack-of-all-trades
[ein Mädchen für alles].” 1 But “to be a jack-of-all-trades,” even “the” jack-of-
a ll-trades, the “all-purpose” do-it-all, was not, in the eyes of the philosopher,
an unworthy role for phenomenology. Nor, as we will see, is it indecent, in
the words of Saint Thomas, for philosophy nobly “to serve” theology. Max
Scheler adds that it is even “the fact that phenomenology is a jack-of-all-
t rades [dass sie ein Mädchen fur alles] which rightly constitutes its positive
and remarkable value [ihr ausgezeichneter positiver Wert].”2 We could there-
fore positively use phenomenology without losing phenomenology. Better,
phenomenology would perhaps never itself be as “good” [bonne] as when
it is left “used,” that is, borrowed for a purpose (usage) that pertains to its
essence as such: “Phenomenology can be practiced and identified as a man-
ner or style of thinking,” emphasizes Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the preface
to the Phenomenology of Perception (1945), adding also that it is not just a
question of “myth” or of “fashion,” and that it refuses to be circumscribed
as a “movement” or as a collection of “doctrines.”3 Briefly, and this can now
be understood, it is a question here of seeking “the handyman phenomenol-
ogy [la bonne de la phénoménologie]”—less in order to draw up an invoice
for his work accomplished, or even to set up shop in the household amidst
all other approaches, than to assess, in a methodological way, his capacity to
renew the practice of medieval philosophy itself.
The Contradictions of a Practice

Yet it is necessary to recognize that the hypothesis of a “phenomenological
practice of medieval philosophy” does not come naturally and appears, from
the vantage of phenomenologists as much as medievalists, if not exceeded, at
least displaced.
(a) Let us begin with the phenomenologists first, because “to use” phe-
nomenology in this way is unworthy of its aims and limits. Firstly, in its
3
4 Fons Signatus: The Sealed Source
aims, phenomenology is not allowed to be annexed by any other discipline,

for this would court the opposite risk of reducing it to the simple role of
ancillary method unworthy of the “things themselves” (Husserl, Ideas I, §
19). Tied too much in its essence to theology, medieval philosophy will offer
itself therefore to phenomenological interpretation only in an illegitimate
way, at least insofar as it ignores the “methodological atheism” which always
remains the rule. In its limits, then, the originary donating intuition of the
phenomenon would not “exceed the limits in which it is thus given,” with-
out immediately going against the “principle of principles” (Ideas I, § 24).
There again, the constant return to transcendence condemns medieval phi-
losophy to a phenomenological inadequacy, in that it makes every epochê of
God impossible and exceeds the bounds of the immanence to consciousness
assigned to every phenomenon in order for them to appear. “Methodological
atheism” and “absence of every presupposition” are thus the two principles
transgressed from the beginning by medieval philosophy, and which make
impossible every attempt at a “phenomenological practice” of medieval
philosophy—unless we were to use it only as a procedure to translate, as a sort
of “flavor of the month,” the language of yesterday (albeit falsely accused of
obsolescence).
(b) From the medievalist point of view, this divorce, or this impossible
marriage, of medieval philosophy and phenomenology thus appears to be
definitively consummated. Those well versed in medieval philosophy, all too
aware of the complexity of its sources and the historical strata of its texts,
would never allow the medieval corpus to be so disfigured by those who
would approach it. Could we not argue for the tension of metaphysics and
theology in Augustine’s De Trinitate (primacy of relation over substance)
without forcing ourselves to look through the lens [prisme] of the overcom-
ing of onto-theology, which itself is rather hard to find in the actual history
of philosophy? Or still, is not connecting Heidegger’s definition of phenom-
enality with Erigena’s conception of theophany only to miss the point of
the disclosure of things themselves in Heidegger and God’s manifestation
in Erigena? Further, is it legitimate to see a mode of Husserlian “reduc-
tion” in the impossible reification of God at the heart of Meister Eckhart’s
sermons on Martha and Mary (Serms. 2 and 86), without simultaneously
losing the radicality of the phenomenological epochê and the meaning of
theological conversion itself? Is it not completely inadequate to attempt to
elucidate the “glory of the flesh” in Irenaeus and/or the “density of the body”
in Tertullian with the help of the phenomenological duality of body (Körper)
and flesh (Leib)—all the more so as the “becoming flesh” of phenomenol-
ogy (Leiblichung) does not at all resemble the “becoming man” of theology
(Menschwerdung)? And is it possible for the “conversion of the senses” in
Bonaventure and the “experience of the stigmata” in Saint Francis to bring to
light something of the meaning of the “phenomenalization of the flesh” and
the “silent experience that accompanies it” without betraying both the pure
immanence of what gives itself in phenomenology and the ordinary nature

of experience that it is supposed to describe? Finally, what should be said
about the search for a “community of monads” in Origen’s description of
the communion of saints (Homilies on Leviticus), the new and revolutionary
meaning of alterity in Aquinas’s question in the Summa about the knowledge
of one angel by another (Ia, qq. 50–64), and the discovery of the haecceity
of the other in Duns Scotus, which lies in contrast to all the contemporary
tendencies to posit some kind of neutrality in the discourse on alterity (Ordi-
natio II, d. 3)? These questions and interpretations all fall under the three
headings of “God,” “the flesh,” and “the other,” which happen to be the three
great questions of contemporary philosophy and which are therefore a way
of testing medieval philosophy as a possible phenomenological practice—
with, of course, an awareness of the ever-present danger of anachronism.
What is the profit of such a transgression of boundaries? Is it for phenom-
enology, which would only suffer by being annexed by theology here? Or is
it for medieval philosophy, which would not withstand very well being the
“flavor of the month” without clearly measuring the distance that separates
it from our times? Is it for those who practice both disciplines together, and
who would thus be suspected of trying to reheat stale dishes and present
them as fresh and in this way ignoring their historicity? The objections are
too clear here to spend time multiplying them, which would only be willful
obfuscation rather than a concern with not taking them seriously.
The Programmatic Relevance of the Middle Ages

And yet it is true that only those who take the risk can succeed, and “to think
is to decide,” as Heidegger said so well. Critique is too easy for those who
make a profession of it, but the task of conceptualization borders on impos-
sibility for those who bear the burden of its realization. I suggest that today
medieval philosophy ought to find, or rediscover, its relevance (actualité)—
not simply in the sense of becoming the current fashion (l’actualité), but
more deeply in its etymological sense as deploying its potentialities not yet
actualized (actualitas). Few fields are so replete with texts, gestures and atti-
tudes than medieval philosophy, which phenomenology would associate with
ways of being in the world. Whether these are Christian or not—this is not
the question. The point is that these ways of being in the world are there
to be rediscovered for our time. And numerous medievalists today endorse
medieval philosophy’s contemporary relevance. Alain de Libera asks in the
preface to his Penser au Moyen Âge: “why should we work on the Mid-
dle Ages if we do not let the Middle Ages work in us?”4 Pierre Alferi, at
the beginning of his book Guillame d’Ockham, Le singulier, quite rightly
notes: “there is nothing so untimely as medieval philosophy. Despite schol-
arly literature that has improved over the course of several decades, it is
more absent and distant from contemporary culture and thought than the
philosophy of the Ancient Greeks.”5 Better yet, phenomenology itself has had
the pretense of renewing medieval philosophy, although the philosophers
who have drawn on it have never risked pushing the hypothesis to its end:
“The logic of mysticism is simultaneously a logic of the overcoming of meta-
physics,” suggests Olivier Boulnois in relation to Bonaventure’s Six Days of
Creation,6 and Jean-François Courtine, in quest of the sources of Suárez and
the System of Metaphysics, again asks whether “there are not also other, even
more radical, exits, which go so far as decidedly altering the language of
metaphysics. Generally speaking,” he continues, “let me mention spiritual-
ity, mystical theology and without a doubt apophaticism.”7 Referring to the
“anthropology of humility” in Saint Bernard, Rémi Brague supposes that “St.
Bernard’s attempt will possibly continue to enable us to rethink the essence of
philosophy; it will especially aid phenomenology in realizing its native pos-
sibilities.”8 Finally, Emmanuel Martineau writes in his book Malevitch et la
philosophie that “we profess the need and possibility of a ‘phenomenological
mysticology,’ the validity of which does not depend on the primary alterna-
tive between belief and unbelief.”9
The number and strength of these kinds of discourse, which are always
only programmatic, ought to leave us stunned since the declarations of prin-
ciple are almost never followed through in practice. Indeed, all occurs as if
the task was to liberate medieval studies from its purely historical shack-
les—as has been the case for Aristotle (Pierre Aubenque), Descartes (Jean-Luc
Marion), Kant (Martin Heidegger), and many others. But at the same time no
one dared to enact the “liberation.” This is certainly not because of weakness
or ignorance but rather fear—sometimes, let it be said, legitimate and prob-
ably specific to medieval philosophy—of a confusion of genres: philosophy
and theology, on the one hand, and phenomenology and the historiography
of texts, on the other. However deep the polemic, there is no denying that
medieval philosophy still awaits its aggiorniamento, which I already called
for at the beginning of my Saint Bonaventure et l’entrée de Dieu en théologie
(2000).10 This is not to say that what others have accomplished and continue
to do should no longer be done, for the phenomenological interrogation of
medieval philosophy is impossible apart from an updating of its sources, not
to mention the translation of texts, which ensures their accessibility. Yet the
rediscovery of texts quarried by our pioneers ought now to help us explore
the depths of the mine. The era of translation and transmission of texts cer-
tainly ought to continue, but it will not serve anything if it is not passed on
to those who try to “see the thing itself.” For such is required by phenome-
nology—as Heidegger once confided that Husserl “had implanted eyes” in
him (GA 63: 5).
The one who practices medieval texts in phenomenology “will see” what
has not yet been seen—not in seeing that which was never there, but rather
because the self of the phenomenologist and/or the medievalist has not yet
reached the place of “the thing itself,” there where the “withdrawal” occurs
of that manifestation that still remains anticipated. Profunda fluviorum scru-

tatus est, et abscondita produxit in lucem—“he has scrutinized the depths of
the waters and has brought to light what was hidden” (Job 28:11). The task
that Bonaventure assigned to the “theologian perscrutator” in his prologue
to the Commentary on the Sentences—“to scrutinize” the depths (scrutare
profunda) and “to bring to light” the hidden or not yet revealed (producere
in lucem)—correlates precisely with the task of the phenomenologist who
rediscovers here the original and, as it were, anterior, attitude: first to “sound
and attain the ground by sounding” (ergründen) rather than “to ground in
reason and provide a foundation for” (begründen), and second to make clear
the “illumination of being [Aufweisung von Seiendem] as it is shown in itself
[so wie es sich an ihm selbst zeigt],” rather than presupposing a doubling in
its appearance which is never shown.11 Descending the river, or scrutinizing
its depths in order to discover there its “hidden treasures” (abscondita), the
medievalist who at the same time practices phenomenology will become a
“diviner” or “perscrutator,” thereby becoming a contemporary with the cor-
pus of his ancestors the medievals in the same way that Heidegger traversed
so many philosophers. As his disciple and friend, Hans-Georg Gadamer, put
it: “His path through the history of philosophy resembled that of a diviner.
Suddenly his stick comes to a halt: he found it.”12
The Stages of a Journey

A single question orients us here, and then the entirety of our research: “How
and in what way is God given to be seen (“he who has seen me has seen the
Father,” Jn. 14:9) and touched today (“the Word of life that our hands have
touched,” 1 Jn. 1:1)”? What yesterday, in the fathers and medievals was in
the order of sensible evidence (the presence of God as “relation,” his “mani-
festation” in the world, his “visibility” to others, his “taste” in the Eucharist,
etc.), has in our day become much more distant and ethereal. To rediscover
the meaning of the incarnation in general, whether of man or God, is thus to
interrogate the tradition anew and to avoid sinking into a purely “abstract”
mode of thought that contemporary philosophy especially wants to disavow.
The course is not primarily confessional, nor even theological. It is above all
philosophical inasmuch as the “carnal mode of the human” is what we must
rediscover today.
Discoveries are rare, but the search is priceless. And we hope that we have
also made some discoveries. Let us offer some examples that bear witness to
our searching: the discovery of “relation” where “substance” was expected
in Saint Augustine’s De Trinitate V–VII (chap. 1); “theophany” as a mode
of “phenomenality” in John Scotus Erigena’s Periphyseon (chap. 2); “con-
version” as mode of “reduction” in Meister Eckhart’s Sermons 2 and 71,
including the reduction “to nothing” and “to the nothing” (chap. 3); the
determination of Adam as the “ark of flesh” who “works” and “opens” the
world of the incarnate in Irenaeus’s Adversus Haereses IV–V (chap. 4); the
“flesh of death” which is first a “flesh for birth” in Tertullian’s De Carne
Christi VI, 6 (chap. 5); the “conversion of the senses” as the location of an
“intercorporeality” of man and God in Bonaventure’s Breviloquium V, 6
(chap. 6); the communion of saints as interaction of monads in the divine
sphere in Origen’s Homilies on Leviticus VII, 2 (chap. 7); alter-angelic knowl-
edge as the first prohibition of solipsism in Aquinas’s Summa theologiae Ia,
q. 50 (chap. 8); and the singularity of the other as an exemplary mode of all
forms of haecceity in Duns Scotus’s Ordinatio II, d. 3 (chap. 9).13 In short,
the “phenomenological practice of medieval philosophy” is hardly content to
acknowledge negatively a prism of onto-theology which barely existed in the
medievals if at all. Everyone now knows that Heidegger found it in a certain
Avicennian interpretation of Duns Scotus (really Thomas of Erfurt).14 On the
contrary, we ought to seek positively in medieval philosophy gestures, con-
cepts, and attitudes that properly manifest modes of being common to the
man of yesterday as much as today: his relation to God (part I: Augustine,
Erigena, Eckhart), the flesh (part II: Irenaeus, Tertullian, Bonaventure), and
the other (part III: Origen, Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus)—in other
words the three great themes of contemporary philosophy rediscovered at the
heart of medieval philosophy.
Let us be clear: to practice phenomenology or live as a phenomenologist
while reading the fathers and medievals is not simply to apply a method to
them or force them into the straitjacket of some new current of thought, or
even to impose questions on them that are not their own. In this work, much
like the novels of Faulkner for Claude Romano (Le chant de la vie), the texts
of medieval philosophy “in no way constitute a general, neutral and universal
method which would hold good for any text whatsoever. It is precisely the
opposite. This book would have never been written if the phenomenological
character of these [texts] had not, in some way, ‘leaped into view,’ if it had not
imposed on us its authority and evidence. In the phenomenological context,
it is not the phenomenologist who applies a method to the object from the
exterior, but rather the object which ought to prescribe its own method to us,
that is to say, etymologically, meta e hodos in Greek, signifying the ‘path that
leads beyond the obstacle,’ the mode of access which is appropriate for it . . .
Thus the thing which the text opens is less the object than the subject of the
phenomenological method . . . A truly phenomenological reading ought to
yield the word to the author as phenomenologist.”15
In this study we will not be content, therefore, to find “the medieval
origins . . . of phenomenological thought,” which was moreover perfectly exe-
cuted regarding intentionality in particular by A. de Muralt and D. Perler.16
We will attempt instead to think medieval philosophy in a phenomenologi-
cal way, to see, or better to read in seeing, what the fathers or medievals
themselves have “seen” or “wanted to see.” What matters, according to the
attitude of true thinkers, is less what they say (quid) then the way they say it
(quomodo)—the elucidation of “meaning” through the exposition of “acts,”

or even to find the “asked” (Erfragtes) behind the “questioned” (Gefrag-
tes) and the “interrogated” (Befragtes): in §7 of Being and Time, Heidegger
famously declares that “the expression ‘phenomenology’ primarily signifies a
concept of method. It does not characterize the ‘what’ of the objects of philo-
sophical research in terms of their content, but the ‘how’ of such research.”17
This is also true, for example, and it will be our goal to demonstrate it below,
for John Scotus Erigena and his definition of God as “He who runs and sees”
in his Periphysion (I, 452 B). To derive the name of God from the etymology
thêo (I run) and not only from theôrô (I see) is to show precisely that the
divine is not first manifest in “what he is” (quid) but in the “mode” or “way”
that he appears and is manifest to man (quomodo): “His word runs swiftly”
(Ps. 147:15).18 Similarly, the affirmation of Tertullian in his De Resurrectione
carnis (IX, 2–3) that “the flesh is sister to Christ [Christi sororem]” because
“Christ loves the flesh [diliget carnem] which is so close to him in many ways
[tot modis sibi proximam],” is only possible because the flesh appears as the
most proper modality of his incarnate, christic being—that to which he is
attached as that which is “closest to him,” as opposed to a simple corporeal
substance in a potentially reified sense.19 Likewise Thomas Aquinas’s treat-
ment of alterity is phenomenologically decrypted from the starting point of
his angelology. In light of the question “whether an angel knows another
angel” (utrum unus angelus alium cognoscat) in the Summa (Ia, q. 56, a. 2),
Thomas draws a distinction between the knowledge of one angel by another
“according to its natural being [secundum esse naturale],” and its knowledge
“according to its intentional being [secundum esse intentionale].” Here he
reveals, in a virtually phenomenological way, that the second (intentionality)
is fitting for alter-angelology. Not “being” a body, but only assuming a body
“in order to appear,” the phenomality of the angel manifests its mode of true
being as “being-for-another”—through his intentional consciousness in his
relation to another angel, and through the flesh appearing in relation to man:
“It is not for themselves [propter seipsos] that the angels need to assume a
body, but for us [propter nobis].”20
We could multiply the examples infinitely, so rich is the medieval corpus
and so unsuspected its hidden treasures. How often the diviner’s rod comes
to a halt: “he found it!”—the diviner knows how to read and to disclose the
acts or lived modalities of consciousness where one ordinarily searches for
things or regions within being. The return “to the things themselves” has
never sought to find anything else than the ascent of beings of the world
(Ding) toward the acts which constitute them and insofar as they concern us
(Sache): “We want to return to the things themselves [auf die Sachen selbst
zurückgehen],” said Husserl in the first formulation of this imperative at the
beginning of the Logical Investigations (1901). “By means of fully-fledged
intuitions,” he continues, “we desire to render self-evident that what is here
given in actually performed abstractions is what the word meanings in our
expression of the law really and truly stands for.”21 Thus phenomenology is
“at the same time and above all a method and an attitude of thought: the
specifically philosophical attitude, the specifically philosophical method”—
always “implanted” in the eyes of Husserl, as in our own.22 Therefore neither
a myth nor fashion, nor even less a movement or point of view, phenom-
enology is first a way of being, a sort of relation—to oneself and to God of
course, but also to the world and its diverse expressions, to others and to
texts that interpret them, often intimately: “The one who philosophizes . . .
understands the others in whose company, in critical friendship and enmity,
he philosophizes. And in philosophizing he is also in company with himself,
as he earlier understood and did philosophy, and he knows that, in the pro-
cess, historical tradition, as he understood it and used it, entered into him in
a motivating way and as a spiritual sediment.”23
The Tree and Its Fruits

Nothing is totally new, even less in medieval philosophy, for pure novelty
only exists as it is rooted in and drawn from the past that precedes us, and
moves through us from end to end. The past never gets as much “authority”
as in the corpus of the Middle Ages, for here more than elsewhere authori-
tas is first asserted by its author (auctor), in a “saying” that he thoroughly
assumes, whether in a soliloquy or sermon, and even more in a “respondeo,”
in the sense that yesterday’s decision ought to make an echo today in our own
declaration: “Whether the answer is ‘novel,’ ” says Heidegger in §2 of Being
and Time, “is of no importance and remains extrensic. What is positive about
the answer must lie in the fact that it is old enough to enable us to learn to
comprehend the possibilities prepared by the ‘ancients.’ ”24
“The tree is recognized by its fruits”: a famous expression, but it is not the
appanage of the Gospel alone (Lk. 6:44). For it is also the leitmotiv of every
philosophical quest, and in particular of the medievalist, who, far from mea-
suring his success by the yardstick of his own a priori principles (for example:
can I treat theological thematics while being a licensed philosopher? Do I
have the right to think from my contemporaneity while I study a historical
body of work?), ought on the contrary to understand it by extending it to his
a posteriori practice. This is only because downstream, the experience of “the
phenomenological practice of medieval philosophy” is sufficiently verified
that it becomes, upstream, finally possible to proclaim some rules or base-
lines. Such is a required condition in order not to devolve into some kind of
new formalism.
The gain of the enterprise, if I understand it correctly, will thus be dou-
ble: for medieval philosophy texts can be read as they have never been read
before, not in order to see something else there, but to see the same things
in a new way; for phenomenology, gestures, attitudes and postures will be
discovered that are capable of opening its horizon to kinds of experience that
it has itself not yet described or even suspected. Rémi Brague, concerning the
rapprochement between “nothingness” [nihilité] in St. Bernard and “nothing-
ness” [néant] in Heidegger notes: “I suspect that it is not a question here of
thinking of these theses as if they were identical. Each occupies a determinate
place in a determinate context determined in each thinker—which I am not
able to outline here. We can, however, suggest a convergence toward a thesis of
which it would be necessary to await phenomenology, that ‘secret nostalgia of
the history of philosophy’ (Husserl), in order to see it formulated fully. Regard-
ing St. Bernard, it is not a question any longer of pretending to leap over the
centuries, of demeaning the status of anything. To the contrary, it is a matter of
seeing how he could help our present to go beyond itself . . . to allow phenom-
enology to give birth to possibilities with which it still remains pregnant.”25
Let me say it once and for all in order not to sink into gross anachronism:
to practice medieval philosophy phenomenologically is not to require authors
to respond to our questions—they already have enough to do with their own,
and we ours. Rather it is to see how and with what they have responded
to their own, in order to learn from them how to respond to ours. At this
price (alone), philosophical anachronism reveals its prophetic vocation: not
in being content to reread the old in light of the new, but in interrogating the
ancient itself so that it can teach us to work in the region of the new. If yes-
terday’s concepts (God, the flesh, and the other) are not the same as today’s,
we can nevertheless learn from yesterday how to resolve the questions that
are ours today—less in imposing a lens or prism onto them than to propose a
new filter: that of our own life which necessarily lends itself to them in order
to extract, for us as well, an absolute novelty.
The “jack-of-all-trades” [bonne à toute faire] of phenomenology will in
this sense “do it all,” according to Max Scheler, for only phenomenology
can do it: not, however, providing answers to everything, but rather giving
“eyes with which to see” to the one who, lacking a real habitus and a true
hexis, always remains blind to the “thing itself” that is, however, expressed
and seen at the heart of the text. The “phenomenological practice of medi-
eval philosophy” therefore ennobles both the corpus of the Middle Ages and
phenomenology itself: the first because by it one finds what it contains but
has not yet been seen; the second because it verifies yet again its efficacious-
ness, less in order to let itself be absorbed than to progress in the “descriptive
exercise” where it finds its true fecundity: “The descriptive method,” says
Scheler again, “consists in reducing any metaphysical and religious system to
the content of its original experiences, that is, renewing its intuitions in order
to articulate its original sense in reconstructing it and, by that very fact, to
make it live again in all of its intuitive force.”26 “To look for experience at its
source”: the leitmotif fixed by Henri Bergson in his vitalist philosophy, and
largely explored by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the context of his phenom-
enology, will thus serve as the rationality and guiding thread for this new
foundation of a “phenomenological practice of medieval philosophy.”27
The Sealed Source

“Today we are reading from the book of experience (hodie legimus in libro
experientiae) . . . It is a sealed source (fons signatus) to which the stranger
has no access. Only he who drinks from it will still thirst for it.”28 With
these words, at the beginning of Sermon 3 on the Song of Songs, Bernard
of Clairvaux sets out a program which will lay down some rules which still
need formulation for the sake of the phenomenological practice of medieval
philosophy: certainly a return to the sources (in our case, patristic and medi-
eval), but beyond that it is particularly the unconcealment or liberation from
its flux by the “reaching back to experience” which alone gives access to it.
Said otherwise, neither the text with its mediation (hermeneutics), nor the
disciplines and their disassociation (hypothesis of a separated theology), nor
religion and its study (philosophy of religion rather than religious philoso-
phy), can nor ought to distance us from the “mode of lived being” of which
they are carriers.
In his study of medieval philosophy, Martin Heidegger grasped, as early
as 1919, the meaning of Bernard of Clairvaux’s lines on the “sealed source,”
copying them “by hand and in small letters” for his course on “The Philo-
sophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism” (GA 60).29 Heidegger refers
to it again in 1927 in §6 of Being and Time, where, keeping with the meta-
phor of the river, he defines the task of the “deconstruction of the history
of ontology” as “the need to re-animate the dried up tradition and to dis-
solve its alluvial deposits.”30 Already in his thesis of habilitation (Treatise on
the Categories and Signification in John Duns Scotus, 1915), he indicated
and insisted that medieval thought more than any other contains “with the
most intensity latent points of phenomenological consideration.” He adds:
“I consider, as particularly pressing, a philosophical study, more accurately a
phenomenological study, of the mystical, moral and ascetic writings of medi-
eval scholasticism. It is only by these paths that it is possible to reach the
heart of medieval life [zum lebendigen Leben], as it grounded, animated and
fortified in a decisive way an entire cultural era.”31 Moreover, all of Husserl’s
disciples who, as we know, questioned his idealist turn, turned to medieval
philosophy, as if this corpus was best placed to unveil this mode of experience
with the goal of renewing our own thought: this goes for Max Scheler in his
Nature and Form of Sympathy (1923) and his reference to Saint Francis as
the type of “cosmic love,” for Edith Stein and her comparison of “the phe-
nomenology of Husserl and the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas” in the
Jahrbuch Festschrift for Husserl’s seventieth birthday (1929), and for Hanna
Arendt in Love and St. Augustine (1929).32
What was this kairos, so brusquely deployed in the 1920s, which marked
the lineage of origin between medieval philosophy and phenomenology, a
filiation either progressively forgotten, on account of the “system of Catholi-
cism” (Heidegger, Scheler, and Arendt), or reinforced by others in the name
of a conversion that also provoked a certain return to tradition (Stein)? Has

not the common source of Franz Brentano (Dominican, scholar of Thomas
Aquinas, teacher of Husserl, and in some sense father of intentionality) defin-
itively sealed together phenomenology and medieval philosophy, such that
the earliest disciples all but followed the first love of their forgotten master?
Without tracing its genesis here, it is at least necessary to recognize as a his-
torical fact and a problem for thinking that the relation of phenomenology to
medieval philosophy, and probably logic and psychology as well, constitutes
both ground and source. Returning there is to betray neither phenomenology
nor medieval philosophy. On the contrary, it is to liberate what still awaits its
actuality in the sealed source: a new deciphering of the “book of experience”
(liber experientiae), and thus to modify the entirety of the status quaestio-
nis—(a) first of hermeneutics, (b) then theology, (c) and finally the philosophy
of religion.
Phenomenology and Hermeneutics. (a) Firstly, it is certainly clear that phe-

nomenology does not have the same meaning in philosophy and in theology
(or in the philosophy of religion in general). Theologians and the philoso-
phers of religion make phenomenology a descriptive approach to the real,
independent of any method, as if it were sufficient to deploy a given in its
pure objectivity in order to expose its truth. This is true for pioneers such as
Rudolf Otto in his Idea of the Holy (1918) and Mircea Eliade in The Sacred
and the Profane (1956) as well as of Hans Urs von Balthasar in his book
Truth (1952). Husserl, on the contrary, at the very same time that such a
reading of the philosophy of religion was emerging, defines phenomenology
in his Ideas I (1913) as a “purely descriptive discipline exploring the field of
transcendentally pure consciousness in light of pure intuition.” Rather than,
like the philosophy of religion, describing an objectivity, phenomenology as
such turns away from objectivity by means of the method of the reduction
and returns to the lived acts of consciousness, toward “the originary presen-
tive intuition” as “legitimizing source of cognition.”33
The distinction of the two disciplines— philosophy of religion as the
description of an objectivity and phenomenology as an enaction of the
reduction—would matter little if one were studying here a corpus independent
from theology, and therefore in some way indifferent to its phenomenological
use. But this is not the case, precisely in medieval philosophy, which is too
attached to God to subject him to the least epochê. Independent from the
so-called “system of Catholicism,” we will only recover “the values latent in
the Catholic Middle Ages”—to follow Heidegger’s “Letter to Krebs”—to the
degree that we know how to appreciate it.34 The “heart of medieval life” is
certainly discovered within the structure of Scholasticism, erected for all of
history starting from the medieval era—this is well known. But this “system
of knowledge,” according to Kant’s expression (the Scholastic concept of phi-
losophy), far from being opposed to the “general ends of humanity” (cosmic
concept of philosophy), on the contrary returns there. There are not two con-
cepts of philosophy, one to be rejected as pure “architectonic,” and the other
posed in its “teleological” function. The concept of medieval philosophy is
first and foremost a “regulative” concept. The fathers examined in this book
(Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, Augustine) relate to the medievals (Erigena,
Bonaventure, Aquinas, Scotus, Eckhart) in that what makes their “period” is
less their history than it is a certain way of conceiving a text and its interpre-
tation as a kind of relation to the other (respondeo) or to God (confessio).35
To think philosophy with the medievals, including the Scholastics (see
Aquinas or Scotus) is to be made capable of deciphering, at the very heart
of systematization, both the “mystical” and the “experiential.” The Middle
Ages, with its commentaries, disputations, and summas, certainly brings
about a new mode of exposition. But the spiritual aim is always the source
of its texts, writings, and dictations, written by fathers, monks, and clerics.
Reading is here a “mode of living” or “mode of spiritual life” of the Middle
Ages—and in this way, precisely, medieval philosophy can renew the aim of
contemporary hermeneutics. The art of reading the world of the medieval
epoch requires that we take a new look at the relation of phenomenology
to hermeneutics. It is all a matter of “grafting.” A conflict of interpretations
where, as in Paul Ricoeur’s famous phrase, the “grafting of hermeneutics
onto phenomenology” is enacted, makes possible the diversity of meanings
in a text, it is true. But I suggest this textual struggle finds its first source in
a conflict of lived experiences—and in the Middle Ages more than anywhere
else. For during this period, however little explored by Paul Ricoeur (except-
ing Augustine), the text is not only mediation, but also, I suggest, exposition
that brings about a certain meaning, but also and above all the exposition
of a self in the entirety of a life which makes it hard to read apart from its
author, reader, and its referent.36
Jean Decorte has emphasized that medieval culture is a “culture of read-
ing” except that “people do not read books [as most people were illiterate]
but reality itself.”37 In other words, if there is hermeneutics, it pertains not to
texts but to the world, not to words but to life: “Books [libri] are the hearts
of men [corda hominum],” says Hugh of Saint Victor, “and the book of life
[liber vitae] is the wisdom of God [sapientia Dei].”38 Indeed, signs matter lit-
tle, and we are prohibited from reducing mysticism to pure logic in medieval
philosophy. “Symbols” matter more, understood here in a descriptive manner
as aisthêsis or “the good use of the sensible” (recte utamur sensibilibus).39
Language certainly carries a meaning which is appropriate to it, and both
hermeneutics and analytic philosophy have demonstrated this in the diverse
modes of contemporary interpretation of the medievals. But as a collection of
signs (logic) or vehicle of meaning (hermeneutics), the act of speech is no less
revelatory of a lived experience that fully overflows it, including “the pure—
and, so to speak, still dumb—. . . experience, which now must be made to
utter its own sense with no adulteration” (phenomenology).40 Otherwise put,
and in order to pass in a new way from phenomenology to medieval philoso-

phy, the experience of the world, in both cases, has primacy over the reading
of texts, and the experience of the self has primacy over the conjunction of
signs. The proof is the originarity of the “book of the world” (liber mundi)
over the “book of Scripture” (liber Scripturae) which Bonaventure establishes
following Hugh of Saint Victor, and in relation to which only sin justifies a
new order of priority: “It is certain that in the state of innocence man had
knowledge of created things and by way of representations he praised, hon-
ored and loved God . . . But when man fell and lost this knowledge, there was
no one to lead him back to God. This book, the world [scilicet mundus], was
dead and effaced. Thus another book [alius liber] was necessary by which
man was enlightened in order to interpret the metaphors of things. This book
is Scripture [liber Scripturae].”41
Avoiding any facile shortcut, and because such linkages often suffer many
dangers of anachronism in order to bear meaning for today, the originarity of
the “book of the world” (liber mundi) makes man into a “being in the world”
before being a “being in relation to the text” in Bonaventure (liber Scripturae).
And the “book of life” (liber vitae) makes man into a “being to oneself” or
to his own heart before being a “being of language” (zoon logikon) in Hugh
of Saint Victor. Here is found the “heart of medieval life” (lebendigen Leben)
so avidly sought by the young Heidegger, only later to abandon it. And this is
also what justifies today—in contrast to Paul Ricoeur—the choice of the short
path rather than the long path, of “the ontology of understanding as a mode
of being of Dasein” rather than “degrees which pass from semantics to reflec-
tion.”42 The cost is high and seems to ignore the mediations that necessarily
abound in the Middle Ages. But this is to forget that one does not pass to the
world except through the self, albeit in and through a community of lived
experiences out of which is born a conflict of interpretations, and never the
inverse. The “grafting” of hermeneutics and analytic philosophy, occurs only
on the “living body” of phenomenology, not in the sense that the latter wields
supreme power over the others, but rather in the sense that the unspeakable
aspect of the carnal dimension of man (descriptive phenomenology) always
has primacy over the verbal interpretation of its meaning (hermeneutics) and
over the grammatical formulation of its propositions (logic).
Philosophy and Theology. (b) The problem of the relation between philoso-
phy and theology is not independent of the “phenomenological practice of
medieval philosophy” and the “sealed source of the book of experience.” As
I have already emphasized, a methodological atheism is appropriate to the
phenomenological method, and there is nothing more unfitting than always
wanting to baptize those who, deliberately and sometimes justifiably, refuse
to be. At the very time when Heidegger embarks on his quest for “facti-
cal life” (Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 1922) that some
years earlier he thought he found in the “heart of medieval life” (Treatise
on the Categories and Signification in John Duns Scotus, 1915), he makes a

definitive break with every form of transcendence which wrongly consecrates
facticity as a product of a humanity derived from God: “If philosophy is
fundamentally atheist [grundzätlich atheistisch] and understands this, it has
made a decisive choice and retained for itself and as its object factical life [das
faktische Leben] with regard to its facticity.”43
Does this mean that a phenomenological approach to medieval philosophy
is impossible, since in its transcendence and dependence on God it defini-
tively exceeds the mode of being of immanence and the separation of Dasein
proper to modern man? The question is certainly worth being asked but can-
not be fully treated in this short introduction. It is perhaps enough to say that
the very idea of a weight of existence constituting the anxiety of mankind is
derived primarily from Heidegger’s interpration of Saint Augustine—oneri
mihi sum (“I am a burden to myself,” Confessions X, 28). This marks the fact
that in philosophy there is no bracketing of history. Scripture (Saint Paul),
the fathers, and medievals (Augustine and Duns Scotus), as much as the mod-
erns (Luther), serve as the source of Heideggerian facticity, even though their
interpretation was necessarily truncated by virtue of their placement outside
of every form of transcendence.44
What remains is the examination of the conditions for a relation between
philosophy and theology—not only for today, but also to liberate in the past,
along with the medievals, the source which lies hidden there. But the paradox
is that the more we theologize, the better we philosophize, even though the
thesis of a “Christian philosophy” as such can no longer be maintained.45
The proportionality of the relation between philosophy and theology in the
medieval corpus in fact outweighs the opposition in principle. “It is to misin-
terpret history,” argues Etienne Gilson in his trenchant article, “Les recherches
historico-critiques et l’avenir de la scolastique” (1951), to believe that the
theologians of the 13th century first got a foothold in philosophy in order
then to pass to theology: “they did not begin on the basis of the philosophi-
cal sciences of their time in order to adapt theology; they began with faith
in order to assume the philosophy of their time and metamorphise it in the
light of faith.”46 This capital formula deserves comment. Indeed, we would
be wrong to look for a pure philosophy where first it is a matter of theology.
Thomas Aquinas, at the beginning of the Summa theologiae (Ia, q. 1, a. 5),
says that sacred doctrine makes use of the philosophical sciences “as inferior
and ancillary sciences [tanquam inferioribus et ancillis]” not as “servants” or
slaves, as later dialectical readings have asserted, but as “its servants [ancillas
suas] which Wisdom has called upon in the highest places of the city [vocare
ad arcem]” (Prov. 9:3). In other words, in the Middle Ages it was an honor
for the servant to be exhorted to serve and to work in the house of the master,
just as it is appropriate for philosophy, after having first attended to its own
tasks (the cosmos and humanity), to receive the invitation from theology to
remain within it as well (at the heart of the theos or the divine).
Let us be careful: to plead for philosophy the honor of theology is not to

destroy the philosophical as such; indeed, far from it: “Neither Duns Scotus
nor Thomas Aquinas founded their theology on any philosophy, not even that
of Aristotle,” notes Étienne Gilson, “rather, as theologians, they have used phi-
losophy in the light of faith and there philosophy came forth transformed.”47
This does not mean that there is no philosophy in the Middle Ages or that every
philosophy is necessarily annexed by theology, but rather only that the light of
faith (lumen fidei) always remains, at least for the medievals, the source and
root of their own thought. We could, and perhaps we should, study the medi-
evals apart from a personal conviction of faith—because no one is obliged to
believe and the fact remains that such a prism could distort thought or objec-
tivity. But we cannot, and we ought not, act as if the medievals themselves did
not think, read, and write in and by the light of faith. Said otherwise, it matters
little whether the medieval authors themselves embraced the methodological
atheism that is the rule for phenomenology. What matters is the recognition
of the impossibility of the idea of atheism for the medievals themselves, out
of which, however, a new form of humanism or philosophy can emerge for
our time. Gilson himself remarked that “experience reveals that the more we
re-integrate historical studies with their theological syntheses, the more the
philosophies of the Middle Ages appear original.”48 Gilson’s final Amen in this
same text—so astonishing in the French context past and present—is not a
plea for theology as the supreme science, but a call for a return to theology as
source out of which the “heart” of medieval life is expressed: “To return Scho-
lasticism to itself, let us listen to the counsel of history: return to theology . . .
To exercise the intellect in the transcendent light of the virtue of faith is some-
thing other than pretending to derive an article of faith from philosophically
demonstrable conclusions . . . The true Scholastic philosophers will always be
theologians.”49 Gilson still awaits his faithful disciples on this point.
Philosophy of Religion and Religious Philosophy. (c) Let us ask then: where
do we place the mystical élan when it is translated into the most abstract
rationality, and what role to give to conceptual logicization when it is rooted
in a hidden and lived mode of one’s self-existence? Said otherwise, if it is
clear that the study of the Middle Ages requires no faith-conviction, how is
such conviction, when shared with the medievals themselves, actually able
to clarify the approach that I adumbrate here? If the unsealing of the source
amounts to the removal of the stone that obstructs the entrance, we should
not prohibit the believer from reading the medievals in the horizon of his
own faith just as we do not refuse the non-believer the right to study them
independently of any conviction, even though, again, it is always necessary
to recognize that the medievals themselves experienced nothing outside the
horizon of faith.
Beyond his famous essay on Le problème de Dieu en philosophie de la
religion (1957), Henry Duméry was also the translator of the Itinerarium of
Bonaventure. This all too often overlooked fact is not insignificant, because
of how much it nourished his entire project and in what ways it could open
onto a potentially new approach to medieval philosophy. Beyond the some-
times justified reticence so characteristic of philosophers in the face of the
distinction between the “philosophy of religion” and “religious philosophy,”
Duméry contends that it is nevertheless the case that “we can only recognize
the blessing of the application of personal religious experience; though not
required, such an application is often of great help in the critique of the reli-
gious object.”50 In other words, in Dumery’s time (1957) when modernity
was probably less open to religion than today, he states that the kerygmatic
enunciation is no longer an obstacle to the exegesis of patristic and medieval
texts, but instead, its most important adjuvant. Medieval philosophy can be
studied either in the domain of the “philosophy of religion” or “religious
philosophy”—the first consists in objectively describing the phenomena as
such, and the second proposing “another philosophical approach to reli-
gious experience in which the parameters of belief are explicitly taken into
account” (it is enough to think here of the medievals themselves and even of
Pascal or Kierkegaard, for example).51 Neither position ought to envy the
other. However, to “unseal the source” and to reach “the heart of medieval
life” depends primarily on each approach adopting the position that is most
appropriate for them, eschewing any false appearances or deceptions accord-
ing to an imposed dogmatism that necessarily kills thinking. Where exactly
the “there” (Da) of man’s “being-there” is in phenomenology (Da-sein) does
not matter, so long as he makes of his own “topos” the most approprate
starting point by which the body of texts and the lived experiences internal
to them are given to thought.
In this sense mysticism is not opposed to rationality, but nourishes it and
is nourished by it in a criss-crossing of intuition and concept which alone
furnishes the key: I call “mystical theology” (theologiam mysticam) states
Bonaventure, “that which leads us to raptures and transports of spirit [ad
supermentales excessus].”52 The excess here not only indicates the negation
of the concept, but also the entrance into a new type of rationality—that by
which man, elevated beyond himself in being penetrated by God, enters into
what Jean Baruzi calls a “theopathy”: “a mystical intuition” which reveals
“that which, interior to metaphysical systems, evades scientific verification
and yet exists for us in the world of thought in the form of a vivifying ele-
ment.”53 Thus in phenomenology no more than in Baruzi—and no more
than in medieval philosophy itself—there is no so-called “overcoming of
metaphysics,” nor even a “renunciation” of its formalization. The prism of
onto-theology—its time is over, as I will argue in part I. And if it is neces-
sary to see, though only in a first step, where the tension between theology
and metaphysics plays out in the re-covering [recouvrement] of “relation” by
“substance” in books 5 and 7 of Saint Augustine’s De Trinitate, then we will
not rest for long in such a methodological preamble. No one learns how to
swim without diving in the water, and no one tastes a fruit without picking it
from a tree. To consent to the Middle Ages means for author and reader alike
the acceptance of the break by consenting to its history [assentire], though
also to note the proximity by means of a certain community of experience
[communauté de sentir] that is possible with it [cum-sentire]. Every “world-
view” [Weltanschauung] discloses a “certain way of seeing the world” at the
same time as it determines the “spirit of an age.” The wager is that what was
true yesterday will still be true tomorrow, so long as we do not lock away
into history the “hidden treasures” (abscondita) which still await their time
of “manifestation” (produxit in lucem): “He has scrutinized the depths of the
waters and has brought to light what was hidden” (Job 28:11).54
Part One
God
22 God
The Onto-Theology in Question

“The fundamental trait of metaphysics is called the onto-theo-logical. We are
from now on, it seems, engaged in explaining how God enters into philoso-
phy.”1 The way in which the question of God is posed today is found in this
well-known formula of Martin Heidegger—certainly in phenomenology, but
also in the discipline of medieval philosophy. That God enters into philoso-
phy—or rather, into theology—I have shown elsewhere with Bonaventure as
a guide.2 But is a linkage necessary, and furthermore, should we connect this
account to the constitution of the metaphysics called “onto-theo-logical”?
And here is precisely the rub. Onto-theo-logy is like the quest for a soul
mate: the more one searches for it, the harder it is to find. It is true that the
term originates in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (this is textually indisput-
able), and comes to term in the severe critique of Martin Heidegger (“The
Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics”).3 But what of its efficacy?
Could it be that what remains “unobtainable” is at this point nonsensical?
“Onto-theo-logy” is the idea of a leading back of the whole of being (ontos) to
God as to its principle (theos) in a self-contained [enfermant] and all-engulfing
[engloutissant] (logos) discourse—it has indeed no rights of citizenship in the
history of philosophy. There is not an author who today does not escape from
this seemingly acute humiliation [fourches caudines que l’on croyait pour-
tant si affutés]. From Aristotle (P. Aubenque) to Hegel (C. Bruiare), by way
of Thomas Aquinas (E. Gilson), Duns Scotus (O. Boulnois), Descartes (J.-L.
Marion), Pascal (V. Carraud), and even Malebranche (J.-Ch. Bardout)—all
the interpreters agree in not recognizing its validity, at least in a historically
founded sense. Does this mean that the notion itself means nothing and its tra-
dition of research means nothing? Is it enough to take the “exact contre pied”
[precisely opposite position] of the hypothesis of the overcoming of metaphys-
ics in order to restore or rediscover metaphysics as such—beyond the “vulgate
du dépassement” [common or crude view of an overcoming] (F. Nef)?4
In the perspective of patristic and medieval philosophy which matters to
us here, it is fitting to highlight again (see the “Introduction”): “For a medi-
evalist, this characterization (onto-theo-logy) of the essence of Aristotelian
metaphysics is valuable, in fact principally as one of the Latin interpretations
of Avicenna which is imposed in the School” (A. de Libera).5 And this Avi-
cennian interpretation of Duns Scotus finds its source precisely in Thomas
d’Erfurt, the sort of pseudo-Duns Scotus to whom Martin Heidegger unwit-
tingly consecrated his dissertation of habilitation defended in Fribourg in
1915 (under the title Treatise on the Categories and Signification in Duns
Scotus).6 It is only one step further to conclude from there that onto-theo-
logy belongs only to this first theological model encountered by Martin
Heidegger at the age of twenty-six.
However, one should guard against hastily made simplifications, which
is rather like handing over our own weapons to those who always critique
God 23
without ever doing anything constructive. That the structure of onto-theo-

logy does not exist in the texts, apart from a particular form of medieval
tradition, does not invalidate it as an attitude, or as a manner of thought
that is proper to avoid. The philosophers have done their best to castigate
the inanity of the model, as have the theologians also in foiling its thrust.
Both of them, however, do not remain any less dupes of the systematization
to which they are themselves also subject. Those who reject the model rarely
challenge the idea of a unificatory and transcendent principle. Likewise, the
restoration of ancient categories (essence, substance, properties, or accidents)
will not suffice to make us believe in a revival of “metaphysics itself” beyond
phenomenology.7 The “metaphysical restoration” faults phenomenology for
having wanted to cut ties with every form of transcendence, while its “over-
coming” has never in reality signified a de-valorization of the divine, but only
another manner of approaching it and of speaking about it. Briefly, if onto-
theo-logy can now consider itself dead as a concept, it has however not yet
admitted its end as “prism”—that is, as “filter” which enlightens by a “new
light” the “spectrum” [spectre] of the scheme of thought.8
But better options exist, I suggest, as far as the “overcoming of metaphysics”
is concerned, particularly as it regards the question of God. For the “negative”
side of onto-theo-logy as a nearly inaccessible model ought not to make us
forget its “positive” side: the quest for an “other language” which is capable
of saying the divine otherwise. One could always, as much as possible, accuse
phenomenology of selling off the heritage of classical metaphysics. But one
will not remove from it, however, the right and the prerogative of the opening
of new realms of philosophy until now unexplored—we think here only of all
the modes of the everyday described by Martin Heidegger and his followers:
anguish, gossip, boredom, fatigue, lassitude, or even birth, joy, exaltation,
jubilation, praise, and so on. If there is therefore something to conserve from
the phenomenological attempt today, independent of its simplifications of the
history of philosophy, it is indeed this opening toward unexplored possibili-
ties. Following the example of a Picasso (cubism), a Monet (impressionism)
or a Cezanne (post-impressionism), it opens up into new fields of research of
which the very existence has been until now ignored—at least as being reach-
able from the starting point of philosophy.
God, the flesh, and the other: It goes without saying that we certainly have
here three themes present from the beginning of the history of thought. But
by starting from the suspension of the quid of the thing, and placing it in the
perspective that starts from its “how” (quomodo), the “descriptive” treatment
of these themes nevertheless allows to appear some unsuspected vantages on
beings themselves: the primacy of relation over substance in Augustine, God
as phenomenon in John Scotus Erigena, conversion as a mode of reduction in
Meister Eckhart, flesh as a mode of visibility in Irenaeus, body as substance
of the incarnation in Tertullian, and so on [see the “Introduction”]. In each
case, what is seen is no longer the simple definition of things, but rather their
24 God
mode of appearance, by which these phenomena, so essential to philosophy

itself (God, the flesh, the other) have become today all the more recognizable
in their own proper ways of being. The list of things “disclosed” is certainly
important here, but not exhaustive. For the joys of patristic and medieval
philosophy are so numerous, though not so easily discovered, and even less
brought to light. In order to handle the question of God [part I], it will be fit-
ting therefore first to follow—but only for a while—the “negative” side of the
overcoming of metaphysics in its tension with theology (chap. 1: Augustine).
Once the field opens, or rather the moving frontiers are established, then the
“positive” side will come, as well as the dazzling phenomenality of God in his
theophany (chap. 2: John Scotus Erigena) and its reduction to an impossible
reification (chap. 3: Meister Eckhart).
The question of God [1st part], as that by which it is necessary to begin
so as to define his mode of “entry” (into theology or philosophy), also deter-
mines our proper relation to our body [2nd part: the flesh] as also to those
who surround us [3rd part: the other]. Once again, the “overcoming of
metaphysics” will not be overcome or forgotten, finally, if one supposes that
phenomenology still has to struggle only with a “structure” that is impossible
to find anyway (onto-theo-logy). Rather, philosophy’s task is to illuminate
some “existentials” which compose our everyday (God, the flesh, the other).
In its phenomenological and mystical mode in particular, patristic and medi-
eval philosophy reveals some habitus or ways of being that we will reach
in order to interrogate. With Augustine as a guide, we will therefore first
show how metaphysics and theology remain always in tension when “God
enters into philosophy,” so that “all the categories undergo a transformation
[mutantur] when they are applied to God” according to the beautiful adage
of Boethius.9
Chapter 1
Metaphysics and Theology in Tension (Augustine)
Transformation of the Categories

With Saint Augustine, something paradoxically “begins” in philosophy, or
rather in theology. Of course, it goes without saying that Christian thought
does not begin with the bishop of Hippo. All patristic thought which has
preceded him (and we will see what this was in Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Ori-
gen) possesses its own proper greatness. But in this nascent and stormy fifth
century—with the sack of Rome and the beginning of the redaction of City
of God in 410—something new, or nearly new, begins to be forged within
theology: namely its dialogue with Greek philosophy and thus metaphysics.
The endeavor of Justin, where “philosophy passes over to Christ,” maintains
of course its proper value, as does the remarkable metaphysical translation
of the theological in the famous “that is” of the Council of Nicaea.1 But
proper to the bishop of Hippo is the attempt to measure its scope, certainly
not in order to regulate it, but rather to demonstrate its ambiguity. We cannot
resolve the tension between metaphysics and the theological so easily. There
are numerous contemporary attempts that desire to rediscover completely
certain theological schemes independently of their historical and dogmatic
deployment, the Trinity or the Incarnation for example. Such are the pre-
tended virtues of a “de-hellenization of dogma” to which these attempts
return, sometimes in an artless way (H. Küng). No one today can truly doubt
the principle that “the hellenization of the faith is the counterpart to the
de-hellenization of its content” (A. Grillmeier).2 The question is therefore
not, or at least not only about indicting the “indigence of language” and the
“indigence of history” in order thus to speak the “truth of Christianity” (M.
Henry). On the contrary, it is about measuring, more humbly but perhaps
more faithfully, the capacity of men themselves to speak and to translate the
“truth of God” into their own “language” as into their own “history.”3
Theological categories do not overcome the concepts of metaphysics to
the point of denying or abrogating them. On the contrary, theologoumena
dialogue with philosophemes in order to compel a “transformation” within
them (mutantur [Boethius]) since they cannot anticipate precisely when “God
25
26 God
enters into philosophy.” In this sense, God comes “into philosophy” only
when he enters also and at the same time “into theology.” Here the hypothesis
of onto-theo-logy collapses on itself: not only in the sense that it is historically
inaccessible, but because it remains principally impossible within the insol-
uble tension of metaphysics and theology. We are forced to recognize, then,
that the old wineskins do not break so easily under the pressure of new wine,
even though the good taste of the new would want to do without the bitter
difficulties of the older. The new attempt of Saint Augustine in book V of De
Trinitate of thinking God as “relation” is original in the way that it refers tire-
lessly to the older idea of “substance” in book VII, which shows precisely that
the prime tension is always only moving toward resolution, and that every
attempt at “overcoming” remains no less a profound “nagging conflict.”
The Augustinian discovery of “relation” (book V) is abandoned in fact
immediately upon its retrieval, by turning it toward its own transgression
(book VII). Speaking hypothetically, if the particular relation to the tradi-
tion that we desire to preserve is primarily one of just fecundity, a relation
of both “critique and dependence,” and not of a simple rejection or arbitrary
denial, then it would obviously be simple pretentiousness or an inordinate
gamble to speak of a “missed turn” in Saint Augustine.4 Turning back to
the source does not mean “thinking against metaphysics” but “excavating
the foundation and tilling the soil”5—“to sound” (ergründen) and no longer
“to found” (begründen).6 To dare to speak and to think a “missed turn”
requires the implementation of a “long way to travel” from the source down
the river, inasmuch as it was diverted in its trajectory by the alluvium of a
falsely metaphysical “onto-theo-logical.” Only that which is before and after
the bend determines the turn as taken or missed—as if it were a country path
(Holzweg) meandering just as much as it clears out an unknown way and
opens toward a new future.7 If in Saint Augustine there emerges an “official
report of a violation,” as if one were witnessing an accident, a true policing
of concepts will attempt then to see there, instead of so much misconduct, an
opening of a new way even in the failure at the bend. In this sense, the turn
will not be termed a failure to the degree that there is found a way opening
toward a certain “modification” [deport] outside of metaphysics (relation as
first category), and will rather be termed a bare sketch, closed and diverted by
the force of a tradition and a more potent straight path (the transfer [report]
of relation in a scheme of substance). Like Galileo, the “discovering and con-
cealing genius” [dé-couvrant et re-couvrant] according to Husserl (Krisis),8
Augustine first “uncovered” in his De Trinitate “relation” as the first category
of a Trinitarian God (book V), and then “covered over” his discovery in link-
ing it continually—if not in its nature, at least in its activity—to substance,
which is thus understood as a philosophical “reading” of the theological
(book VII). The conversion of Augustine, conceptual at this point and no
longer merely existential, is made thus the index of a true discovery and of a
turn taken on the path of faith in search of understanding.
Metaphysics and Theology in Tension 27
The Genius of the Discovery
Toward a Scheme of Non-Substantial Unity

Metaphysics in Theology. Like Irenaeus and Tertullian who both directly
oppose Valentinian Docetism [see chaps. 4 and 5], book V of Saint Augus-
tine’s De Trinitate opens with the polemical prerogatives fixed by the Arian
opposition.9 Instead of denouncing their theses, the bishop of Hippo first
denounces their strategy. Consider the direct application in Christian theol-
ogy of a Greek metaphysical scheme (substance/accidents) to the Trinitarian
God revealed in Jesus Christ (Father—Son—Holy Spirit): “Among all the
arguments that the Arians usually oppose to the Catholic faith,” insists
Augustine, “there is one that they seem to consider the most ingenious of
all traps [maxime callidissimum machinamentum]: When they say that all
the qualifications or concepts applied to God are said not according to acci-
dent [non secundum accidens] but according to substance [sed secundum
substatiam].”10 This passage does not show us that Saint Augustine refuses
to attempt a transcription of philosophy into theology—on the contrary, his
task will be precisely to accomplish such a transcription in the framework
of Christian orthodoxy. Rather it shows us only that the Doctor rejects an
application that is too immediate and univocal. If God enters into theo-logy,
how could it be that a dualizing Greek scheme would be able to articulate in
a direct translation the total novelty of a God simultaneously one and triune?
As a mediated translation, the stakes of the Augustinian refutation of Ari-
anism are thus doubled: first, a translation, with the risk, inversely, of never
giving faith the means of transmitting its content (Grillmeier); second, one
that risks losing the originality of the Trinitarian mystery revealed as such
(contra Arianism). Here arises, then, a challenge that is double: how to come
to terms with [assumer] the inheritance of the Aristotelian categories in order
to speak the Trinity (theology), without falling into the double aporia either
of pure substantiality or of simple accidentality (metaphysics)? I will now
show that such aporias lead, theologically, to the impasses of tritheism and
divine mutability.
Substance or the Danger of Tritheism. Apart from two inversions, in book V

of De Trinitate Augustine explicitly rearticulates the Aristotelian list of cate-
gories. This is a confirmation, if there is one, of the necessity for the bishop of
Hippo to place himself on the terrain designated by his adversaries: namely,
Aristotelian metaphysics.11 However, and here begins the decisive turn, the
necessity of a non-immediate translation of the Trinity into conceptual lan-
guage requires the abandonment of the too-costly (because too exclusive)
alternative between substance and accidents: “Nothing in God has an acci-
dental signification [nihil in eo secundum accidens dicitur], because there is
no accident in him. Nevertheless [tamen], everything that one attributes to
28 God
him does not have a substantial sense [nec omne quod dicitur secundum sub-
stantiam dicitur].”12 Once again, this does not imply for the bishop of Hippo
that substance and accidents are incapable of speaking God, but only that the
primacy of the one (substance as logically and ontologically first) does not
authorize one to conceive it independently of its relation with the others (nine
secondary categories subject to change and related to substance as their nec-
essary substrate). The Trinitarian God translated immediately as substance
effectively leads to a tritheistic scheme unacceptable for the Christian faith:
to understand God “in the non-accidental but substantial sense”—as “the
Arians teach [cum Ariani dicunt]”13—is ineluctably to affix three substances
(tritheism) wherever there are three “persons” (Father, Son and Holy Spirit).
Hence the following explication of the thesis of Arius, starting from his
immediate transcription of the Trinitarian scheme into a philosophical model:
“The Father who is the cause of all beings is absolutely the sole being without
beginning [anarchos]. The Son, begotten by the Father, created and founded
before the ages, was not before his generation . . . he has only been brought
into being by the Father. He is not eternal, nor co-eternal, nor co-engendered
with the Father.”14 Moreover, because every substance is spoken such that
“by relation to itself [ad se ipsum],” neither the Father nor the Son remain
then “for” the other, but only “apart” from the other.15 “An immediate utili-
zation of the schemes of Greek thought,” says theologian Bernard Sesboüé,
“leads to the placing of the Son on the side of the creature. But the Christian
faith has always considered him on the side of God.”16
The Accident or the Immutability in Question. The profit from rejecting

pure substantiality is balanced by a loss no less considerable, namely, divine
immutability. With its autarchic fate inadequate for speaking the reality of
a God at once one and triune, this first and separated substance leaves no
flexibility at all in its implacable incorruptibility as this single determina-
tion whose permanence guarantees only the eternity and immutability of
God.17 This is why, inversely, simple accidentality would not resolve the apo-
ria either. To confer on God some “accidental” attributes (quantity, quality,
place, time, etc.) actually renders unintelligible the very essence of God, at
least from the vantage of classical theology, for which he “remains absolutely
immutable” (omnino incommutabilis manet).18 For the massive objection of
the divine mutability that results from accidental attribution to God itself
contains some unexpected difficulties, much like the no less evident objection
of tritheism resulting from the determination of God as pure substance. Not
that it would be necessary here to interrogate the immutability or impassibil-
ity of God (see Origen [chap. 8, below]), but only that substance is spoken
of indifferently in temporality and in eternity, at least from within the theo-
logical repetition of Aristotelian metaphysical categories.19 It is true that the
immediate translation from Hellenism to Christianity of the determination
of substance to the Father and the Son dangerously confers upon the one an
immutable eternity (the Father as immutable and incorruptible substance)

and to the other temporal becoming (the Son as human and temporal). Acci-
dental attribution to God signifies in this sense not that the Trinity is no
longer a substance—a very naive objection—but that the Son, as substance,
in being incarnate, is given to thought by means of having the determinations
of accidental categories (generation/corruption, increase/decrease, change,
movement, etc.). “God against God”: such is the dualism, not in the sense
of a tension in the Moltmannian manner,20 but of exclusion, by virtue of the
opposition of contradiction between the Son as corruptible substance and the
Father as incorruptible substance. This does not reach, as it were, the reality
either of man, or of God, and even less the God-man. A single proposition
suffices to condemn the “Son having begun to be [coepit esse Filius]” of the
Arians in order to let appear the “Son ever-begotten” of the true Trinity:21
“Father and Son are no longer qualifications of an accidental order [non
secundum accidens], since the one called Father and the one called Son are
eternal and immutable [aeternam atque incommutabile].”22
Tritheism and divine mutability are the two prohibitions imposed in order
to exclude at once pure substantiality and simple accidentality and thus to be
able to say, in one Greek conceptual scheme, the reality of a Trinitarian God.
Is it sufficient then to renounce all properly philosophical argumentation
such as the entire Greek scheme itself? Reborn here with force is the warn-
ing of A. Grillmeier—of which Michel Henry could also have been one of its
addressees—of a necessary “hellenization of the faith as a counterpart to the
dehellenization of its content” (supra). Saint Augustine, in a liberating gesture
but not one of unbridled liberty, actually works an act of internal transfor-
mation of the elder (metaphysics), starting from which is also expressed the
formulation of the totally new (revealed theology). Such is the condition for
the “uncovering” of relation as the first category in book V of De Trinitate,
the middle term between the complete substantialization of trinitary trithe-
ism and the pure accidentality of a total modalism.
The Turn of Discovery

The Impasse: Quid Tres? “Therefore, there is no accidental signification
in God [nihil in eo secundum accidens dicitur], because in him there is no
change [quia nihil ei accidit]. Nevertheless, everything that is said about God
is not said in a substantial way [nec tamen omne quod dicitur secundum
substantiam dicitur].”23 If the determination is neither merely accidental nor
purely substantial, then what is it? The impasse stands there before us, an
unavoidable obstacle without a detour. The bishop of Hippo asks, at the end
of his research, in an extremely halting manner: “Since the Father and the
Son and the Spirit are three, we seek to understand, therefore: three what
[quid tres sint]?”24 We have shown, moreover, that the Augustinian question
“quid tres?” certainly remains in the sphere of ontology (the empire of ti esti,
30 God
“what is”), which Richard of Saint Victor will later draw to the side of “quis
(what)” and Bonaventure toward the “quomodo” (how).25 What remains,
and to this we shall return, is that this question extracted from book VII of
De Trinitate resonates in a different way when read in light of book V. The
question “three what?” is not here a quest for substance, since “everything is
not predicated of God in a substantial sense,” nor an assertion of accident,
since in God “there is no accidental signification.” It appears to be the case
that only a third term, neither of the order of substance nor of accident,
can pull theology out of the ruts of metaphysics—without, however, totally
renouncing their usefulness. From out of this tension (between metaphys-
ics and theology) a new way of seeing and thinking God is born, or rather,
reborn—now within the context of Christian Trinitarian theology: namely, as
“relation” and “person.”
Relation: Ad Aliquid. When the turn is laid down, the discovery is laid bare
[Quand le tournant s’impose, la découverte s’expose]. A something (quid?)—a
concept or tool for thought—clears a new path and delivers us from the
disastrous alternative. The passage is central here and discloses the turn: “But
in God nothing is said according to accident, because in him there is noth-
ing changing. It does not follow that all attribution has a substantial sense,
however. There is also relation—literally ‘movement toward something’ [ad
aliquid]—for example the Father toward the Son [sicut Pater ad Filium] and
the Son toward the Father [et Filius ad Patrem] . . .”26 Something (quid?) is
therefore “relation to another thing” (ad aliquid): “movement toward,” from
one to the other (esse ad) and not the “to be in” of the same substance (esse
in).27 The example (sicut) serves here as a paradigm and not the reverse. Rela-
tion is not first discovered in order then to be applied to the Father, Son, and
Spirit, but rather the necessary connection of the three (Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit) requires the concept of relation, first applied to itself and only later to
man. “Person” (persona or hypostasis) makes of God “someone” and not by
way of transferring what is first a human category to the divine. It is actually
the inverse because God is completely “relational” by nature, and it is within
the context of Trinitarian Christianity, precisely, that the “movement toward”
(ad aliquid) first takes on meaning. The movement of analogy so fully devel-
oped by Thomas Aquinas actually begins with Saint Augustine, for whom
however the movement does not yet concern being but only relation itself.
The simple expression “ad aliquid,” in its narrow formulation and appar-
ent insignificance, ought not therefore to mask the grandeur of the discovery
(not yet covered over) and the decision to turn (not yet missed because it
was not yet taken). It is in the prepositions where a new proposition is often
articulated. The nuggets often remain invisible to the inexperienced seeker
(see the “Introduction”), as does the indomitable turn to the clumsy guide.
It is by “extraction and transfer,” as two subsequent operations, that there
appears then the discovery where the turn arises.
Extraction and Transfer: A Double Operation. Precisely as a discovery, the

“ad aliquid” is not left here to be only the translation into Latin of Greek phi-
losophy’s “pros ti,” whch is ordinarily called “relation” and is fourth among
the well-known enumeration of the ten Aristotelian categories, at least as
received from the tradition: “substance [ousia], quantity, quality, relation
(pros ti), place, time, position, possession, action, passion.”28 In a theological
context, on the contrary, the fourth term (relation) becomes the first (tak-
ing the place of substance)—at least in book V of De Trinitate. Metaphysics
seems not to be able to withstand the weight of the theological, and the ten-
sion always seems to be reaching its breaking point. But the operation is not
so simple, at least from the vantage of De Trinitate, because the bishop of
Hippo is not satisfied simply with “de-hellenization” in order to think oth-
erwise. All the while retaining the Greek (the categories), Augustine sees its
limits in expressing the Trinity (the primacy of substance and/or some other
categories when one needs to resort to the realm of the accident), but is not
satisfied with a facile rejection. Instead of jettisoning Hellenism altogether—a
temptation which we have seen is ever-present even in theology today (Küng)
as also in philosophy (Henry)—Augustine dares to transform it from within.
The first operation is “extraction.” The category of relation (secun-
dum relativum) is alone among all the Aristotelian categories capable of
supporting—contra the “Son who has begun to be [coepit esse]” of the
Arians—the sempiternal “Son ever begotten [semper natus]” of the “true”
Trinity: “Relation is not an accident [non est accidens] because it is foreign
to change [quia non est mutabile].”29 Against the notion of divine mutabil-
ity tied to the attribution of accidents, the category of relation (pros ti) is
strangely extracted from the list of categories in order to be divorced from
the modes of accidentality and change. Its rank is changed (from the fourth
to the first) as well as its nature (no longer simply accidental or connected to
substance). Such is the first condition of speaking the novelty of the God who
is simultaneously one and triune.
Yet a second operation actually accomplishes the transformation—and
brings to light the tension of metaphysics and theology: the “transfer” of
this “extracted” category (relation) to another order or another kind of dis-
course which wants to proceed without reference to substantiality. Neither
substance nor accident, suspended between these two orders, the “movement
toward” (ad aliquid) seeks then another model, even a new “order” that
would be adequate to the uniqueness of the object (quid?) that it seeks: God
as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The quest for a conceptual adequation out
of a metaphysical discourse (substance and/or accidental categories) capable
of articulating the novelty of the mystery (relation) explodes metaphysics
itself. In this way metaphysics is less negated or overcome than it is preserved
and pushed toward its final limits by theology. The capacity to work and
transform (“mutantur” [Boethius]) from within the categories of metaphysics
measures the very power of God to speak to men in another and new form.
32 God
The Quest for Another Model

The Weight of Substance. The sliding of the concept of relation from its prep-
ositional formulation as “movement toward” or “relation to” (ad aliquid) to
its substantive form as that which is called “according to relation” (secun-
dum relativum) appears only at the conclusion of this passage.30 Everything
appears as if practiced at this turning point is a resistance to substantifica-
tion of relation (secundum relativum) to the profit of the single “pros ti”
(“ad aliquid”) as “movement toward”—and thus forcing the discovery to
be concealed. By virtue of this search, perhaps all the more mystical as it is
speculative, the quest for another model of attribution is again made explicit
in book VII of De Trinitate: “But it is not at all that it is necessary to repre-
sent the Father [ullo modo ita putandum est Patrem non dici] by this model
[of relative essence (essentia relative)].”31 One will find therefore as many
models and as many manners in which God enters into philosophy as there
are “reluctances” of theology to install itself directly into the long sojourn
that philosophy has prepared for it. The tension between metaphysics and
theology is not reabsorbed here, but to the contrary, in this specific example
of the formation of Trinitarian concepts in particular, it discloses both the
force of its resistance and the weight under which it succumbs. The discourse
of substance seems to be all the heavier as the attempt to pass it by seems
impossible. From here the attempts to transform previous models are mani-
festly doomed to failure if they attempt to initiate a novelty that is absolute.
Attempts and Failures to Transform Previous Models. Three inherited

models—attempts or temptations—test a total reformulation (in book VII):
(a) the scheme of logical attribution (substance/accident); (b) the theology
of the Word (signifier/signified); and (c) exemplarism (image/paradigm). The
respective failures of each of these attempts at transformation will first invite
silence (the impossibility of directly speaking God in a Greek scheme), before
proffering a new word, however minimal and for Saint Augustine a word
that is always still only stuttering (the necessity, that is, of saying something
in order not to remain saying nothing).
(a) The classical scheme of logical attribution, in its own way, rehearses
the model of substance and accident. Because their relation of strict opposi-
tion has sufficiently shown its aporias, this duality that is all-too sterile seeks
to be overcome by means of establishing as fundamental rule of attribution
the relation of attributes to their substance “as to their subject [hypokeime-
non].”32 Hence the complete revisiting by Saint Augustine at this point of the
example in Aristotle of “color” related to a “colored body” as accident to
substance, out of which he makes a paradigm in order to confirm the repeti-
tion of the former scheme of classical logic.33 Yet the Doctor objects: “It is
not certain that by this model it is necessary to represent the Father,” because
in God substance and attributes are one.34 In order to return to Augustine’s
anti-Arian interpretation of “Christ the power and wisdom of God” (1 Cor.

1:24), in man “being” and “being wise” are distinguished since being man
(substance) does not cease if a man ceases to be wise (accident). In God, by
contrast, being and wisdom are united since “to be is to be wise.” In God’s
case, the only means of attributing wisdom is in an “essential” manner, not
only for Christ but also the Father and the Spirit (Christum Dei sapientiam).35
But what remains in such a scheme, at least on a cursory reading, that per-
tains properly to the Father, Son, and Spirit?36 Against the tendency, or rather
Arian temptation, to substantialize the divine attributes in order to predicate
them properly to each person of the Trinity, the scheme of logical attribution
(substance/accident) fails by the fact that it cannot separate substance and
attributes in God.
(b) However famous is the scheme of the theology of the Word, particularly
in relation to the contemporary retrieval of the signifier/signified relation, it
would no longer be able to resolve the aporia of a triune God who is neither
purely substantial nor merely accidental. Its operation is double: first, bring-
ing to light the relation of auto-dependence and of manifestation (ostensio)
between human words and the realities to which they refer; second, reading
into the figure of the Son, the “Word made flesh,” the supreme dignity of the
One who sends him, the Father: “If this temporal and ephemeral word that
we express manifests itself [se ipsum ostendit] and manifests that of which
we speak [et illud de quo loquimur], how much more the Word of God by
whom all things were made? He manifests the Father exactly how the Father
is [quod ita ostendit Patrem sicut est Pater].”37 The advantage of this new
scheme over the former consists in that it no longer thinks of the relation of
the Father and the Son in terms of pure exteriority, logically articulated in the
form of substance and accident, but according to a structure of return deci-
phered at the very heart of language and attempts to hold together the divine
persons in identity and difference: the Word, even if it “manifests the Father
exactly as the Father is,” is “not what the Father is.”38 However, the bishop
of Hippo can no longer retain this theological scheme of the Word, but here
for the opposite reasons to those related to the first scheme. Whereas the
substantialist model (metaphysics), reacting against all division in God, tends
necessarily to substantialize the divine attributes, the verbal model (theology)
makes the identity in nature of the Father and Son hard to see: the Son, as
the signifying of a signified, “exactly manifests the Father” precisely by the
fact that “he is not himself the Father.” But how is it possible to continue to
say that they are “of the same nature” or “consubstantial” (homoousios)?39
In the verbal scheme there remains a certain amount of lingustic extrensicism
and logic of expression, which is probably carefully avoided today by means
of the aesthetic model of the Trinity, in its taking account of the sensible
(Balthasar).40
(c) The last scheme, more Platonic then Aristotelian, is exemplarism, or
the relation of image to paradigm. Would the Son relate to the Father as the
34 God
“image” (imago) to its “model” (exemplum)? The usual deficiency seen in the
relation of image to model would be enough to reject the proposal as null and
void. The necessary equality of Father and Son would thus be superseded until
we fell again into the aporias of Arianism. Yet if we kept in the background the
Alexandrian distinction between “image” (imago) and “resemblance” (simili-
tudo) as “image of the image” (eikôn eikonos),41 the most proper characteristic
of the image, when it refers to Christ, consists in rendering the model perfectly
and without deficiency: “If the image [imago] truly and perfectly renders the
object of which it is the reproduction [perfecte implet illud cujus imago est],
then it is the image which is equal to the object and not the latter to its own
image.”42 The previous aporia of the theology of the Word, consisting in an
impossible identity of persons by virtue of an extrinsicism of the signifying/
signified relation appears here to be resolved: as the river flows from its source
without changing its nature, “the Word is able to be called the image of God
since it is the Father who engenders him.”43 The ancient Platonic (or rather
Plotinian) dichotomy of the image (eikos) and idea (eidos) appears reworked
from within as God enters into philosophy. “The image without model [imago
sine exemplo]”: such is the necessary and no less surprising paradox of a God
at once one and triune. “The Son is an image without its own model [sine
exemplo] . . . He does not model himself on a guide that would precede him
in relation to the Father from whom he is absolutely inseparable, since he is
identical [idipsum est] to him who is his source.”44
But what could be the rigorous meaning of an image without a model?
The bishop of Hippo responds: “Without a model for itself, it is a model
for us [illa sine exemplo nobis exemplum est].”45 The argument here moves
from a solution to the Trinitarian aporia to an imitatio Christi, as if to speak
first negatively about the failure of former schemes to signify God, and then
positively about the ineluctable necessity of silencing philosophy, at least for
a time, in order to allow God to enter theo-logically into theo-logy: “There-
fore, when it is asked: what are these three things?, or, Who are these three
subjects?,” the author of De Trinitate humbly admits, “we try to find a spe-
cific or general name by which we can embrace these three; but no such name
is presented to the mind because the transcendence of divinity surpasses the
resources of ordinary speech.”46 Before the grandeur of the mystery, the
philosopher is interrupted,47 and the theologian is silenced as well.48 Meta-
physics, if not rendered destitute,49 is at least put in tension with theology.
From the Entry into Silence to the Emergence of Word. When silence is
imposed, God is exposed. The opening and closing of De Trinitate responds
to this paradoxical and double exigence of silence and speech. The imperative
of silence before the ineffable mystery is the first thing to say: “Now I will
be trying to speak of things of which no one, especially me, is able to say as
they are thought by God . . . , it is first to this Lord our God, about whom we
ought always to think without being able to think him worthily, to whom,
with praise, is due blessing at all times” (book V).50 However, there emerges a
necessary word—this is the last thing to say: “In order to speak of the ineffa-
ble, it is necessary to speak, as one is able, those things which one is not able
to understand” (book VII).51 The bishop of Hippo, more than any other, is
wary of hemming theology in by the silence of a deviant mysticism of fusion.
For him the absence of discourse is even graver than its exuberant presence.
Only God himself can guarantee its legitimacy: “To the Lord our God . . . I
pray that he will help me to understand and to explain this that I design as
well as indulge my eventual offenses.”52 To speak about what “the three of
the Trinity” are (quid tres?) while not losing sight, as a theologian, of “either
his desire [non solum voluntatis] or his weakness of means [verum etiam
infirmatatis meae]”53 thus depends on the welcome one gives to a word, since
it is necessary to speak about that which one cannot explain, and always on
the foundation of silence because every human word will remain irremedi-
ably inadequate at expressing the profundity of the mystery.
As complex as philosophy and its models are, mere contradiction of its
models does not suffice for theology. It is necessary to live in and to trans-
form the tension between the disciplines. Certainly, when God enters into
theology, it is fitting to speak otherwise and to speak about another: “If the
god enters into philosophy, if therefore philosophy, or more precisely meta-
physics assigns to him a determined place, a particular site,” emphasizes
Jean-François Courtine, “it is perhaps because God has left philosophy, in
order to be spoken no more in a discipline that is characterized as special by
relation to a more general quest pertaining to being as such, but in an ‘other’
doctrine, perhaps also in an ‘other’ language, with an ‘other’ syntax and
according to ‘other’ principles.”54 And yet, at the very instant of the uncover-
ing (of relation as first category in book V of De Trinitate), the covering over
(of the transfer of relation to substance decidedly always posed as originary
in book VII) also comes to birth. Would it be in this sense that the irresolv-
able tension of the metaphysical and the theological is made manifest, and
that to yank theology to a place outside of philosophy is to leave theology
to theologians in order better to delineate the proper field of philosophy?
The question at the very least is posed, and the constant attempt (or tempta-
tion) to break them into distinct orders is not done without interrogating the
history of concepts, which is never satisfied with such a neat distinction for
the sake of a rapid solution. Augustine struggles more than he resolves the
problematic—all to his honor. To accept the resistance or the pressure is not
to renounce every position. On the contrary, it is simply to acknowledge a
theological language always caught up in the movement of the terms of meta-
physics: “Why do we call the three persons ‘the three’ (tres personas) . . . ?,”
as I have already asked following Saint Augustine, “except in order to say
something [aliquod vocabulum servire] and not to remain with absolutely
nothing to say [ne omnino taceremus], when we are questioned about these
three [interrogati quid tres]?”55
36 God
The Act of Covering
Bearing in mind the previous failures at the transformation of ancient mod-

els, it is necessary to begin a new quest, from the starting point of silence, for
this other model of theological attribution that we desperately seek. And yet,
as I will now demonstrate, the theological explication of revelation is always
held in tension with the metaphysics of relation—which is probably a signal
that a rupture of orders is not reached in such a facile manner as is usu-
ally sought, at least when we carve things up precisely where the discourse
appears all the more undividable—always, as we must, attempting to catch
the divine in human language.
The Moment of a Crucial Decision

The Decision and Its Destiny. It is well known that the history of thought is
first the telling of the story of its “decisions.” If it is mainly about “turns” of
thought, then it is here that the course thought takes is more important than
its objects, its “way” more important than its terms themselves. The failure of
previous models (logical attribution, theology of the Word, and exemplarism)
remains too pregnant with possibility for Augustine not to call for another
and new order. Everything occurs, from the beginning of book VII of De
Trinitate, as if the tension in the passage from metaphysics to the theological
was such that it seems better to reduce the tension by eliminating it rather
than resolving it—“to cut the knot instead of untying it,” as Kant said.56 Is a
crossing into this “other order” possible, and more importantly, is it a path
which ought to be taken, both as means of classification and as a command: a
non-metaphysical order on the one hand and a demand for another discourse
on the other? The question certainly ought to be posed inasmuch as it haunts
contemporary philosophical discourse, as well as theology itself. Reread,
nevertheless, in light of Saint Augustine as well as from the paradigmatic
example of the Trinity as “transformation” of the metaphysical categories
when applied to God (Boethius), the response is not self-evident. The moment
of crucial decision is at the same time the decision of a particular moment: a
“decision of a particular moment” if the act of discovery of relation as first
category (book V) always remains covered over by an ontology ever still
substantial (book VII); and a “moment of crucial decision” to the degree that
the destiny of Trinitarian theology itself (as understood by Thomas Aquinas)
corresponds to the closing of the “discovery” or the “missing of the turn”
(Augustine).
The Hypothesis of Another Order. When God enters into theology, is there
a “distance infinitely more infinite” or the necessary passage to another
order—from God as substance to the Trinitarian God of theology? The emi-
nently Pascalian trait of the hypothesis cannot and ought not to hide the
serious nature of the formulation in the bishop of Hippo.57 According to

Irénée Chevalier, the famous exegete of Saint Augustine’s thought, the Augus-
tinian request for a new mode of thinking possesses a certain legitimacy,
since “relation in God comes neither from substance nor accident but rather
constitutes a separate order.”58 The “relative qualification” of God for certain
predicates called “according to relation” (secundum relativum)59 is in fact
opposed explicitly to its “absolute qualification” for other predicates called
“according to substance” (secundum substantiam):60 “Above all,” indicates
the Doctor of Hippo, “let us hold that every absolute qualification [quidquid
ad se dicitur] of this sovereign and divine sublimity has a substantial sig-
nification [substantialiter dici]; and that a relative qualification [quidquid
ad aliquid dicitur] pertains not to the order of substance but to the order
of relation [relative].”61 On the one hand, therefore, the predicates called
“absolute” are proportionate to substance when they are “without relation
to something” (ad se dicuntur, non ad aliud), designating God in his total-
ity: for example, “wisdom” or “power.” On the other hand, predicates called
“relative” are related to relation, when “in mutual relation” with each other
(uterque ad invicem), specifying what is appropriate to each of the divine
persons: as “Son,” “image,” or “Word” specifically designate Christ.62 To the
two distinguishable orders (substance/relation) correspond thus two types of
attribution (absolute/relative) and two fields of attributive categories (wis-
dom, power . . . /Son, Father, image, Word . . .). It is only a small step to
conclude from here that the order of relation escapes the order of substance
and renders it destitute. The separate order of relation (ad aliquid) seems
prima facie to be established in that it apparently has a certain autonomy in
its field of application (neither substance nor accident, but appropriate for
each person in his relation to the others, etc.).
However, and it is here that the discovery begins to be covered over, or
rather that the tension is measured: the scheme of substance, despite the re-
q
uest for a “separated order,” does not cease to exercise its power on the
bishop of Hippo, as if metaphysics ought never to innervate theology, and
impose itself as co-inhabitant with it. Taking into account the whole of his
work, at least the Trinitarian block from books V to VII in De Trinitate,
requires us not to be satisfied only with the discovery of relation as first and
new category that is neither substantial nor accidental (book V), but rather
with how it opens in a new way onto substance that is impossible to erase
completely from Trinitarian theology (book VII).
The Meaning of a Tension. Again, the hypothesis of a “separate order,”

however expressed here, appears to me all the more hopeless as it wants to
ignore the metaphysical categories in which theology has been articulated
from the beginning. The suspicion of dogma is in reality a mistrust of meta-
physics and its categories (Küng). It is not an act therefore of the dogmatic
alone, but also of philosophy. The principle of a necessary “hellenization of
38 God
faith as counterpart to the de-hellenization of its content” (Grillmeier) does

not indicate absolute submission to dogma without reflection, but tries on
the contrary to recognize the metaphysical truth there (substance/accident)
where it attempts to articulate the categories of theology (Trinity), thereby
being transformed by theology (relation leaping out of the pair substance/
accident). In this sense, it would be totally illegitimate to want to renounce
all translation or hellenization. The tension of metaphysics and theology
constitutes the dignity of theology more than it marks some supposed fail-
ure. The simplism of onto-theo-logy and the necessity of taking leave of it
does not signify its ineptitude, as we have seen (see the “Introduction”), but
instead, forgets to disclose the tension because it believes too quickly in some
other resolution. It is not a choice between the exiting of metaphysics, on
the one hand (to be without it, as Augustine understood, is an impossibility)
and a simple transcription into theology on the other (the double aporia of
the “tritheism of substance” and the “mutability of accident”). “Relation”
(ad aliquid) in the Doctor of Hippo becomes the first category in place of
substance (the former first category), but not like substance or any other
category (being designated as neither substantial nor accidental). The gesture
certainly makes a first break with metaphyics and effectively seeks a new
order (book V). But substance, as we will see, remains afterward the sup-
port and substrate of relation itself (book VII). What is read here as a failure
in reality indicates the way toward a greater success. Not in the sense that
Augustine finds a way to resolve the tension, but rather that he brings it to
light and maintains it there in the impossibility of its reabsorption. Theology
is never more philosophical as when it imposes the obligation to pass through
philosophy, all the more so when it would desire to surpass it. Likewise, phi-
losophy is never more entangled with theology as when it raises itself to the
level of a necessity, albeit in order to be transformed. The act of the recov-
ering of relation (book V) by substance (book VII) therefore indicates the
“resistance of substantialist ontology,” not in the sense that it would be nec-
essary either to be discarded or submitted to. Certainly a turn is deciphered
in the recovering, but it is found in the tension more than in a resolution. The
true interest of the metaphysical is found precisely here in its confrontation
with the theological—and vice versa.
The Resistance of Substantialist Ontology

The Decision to Close. “Relation” (secundum relativum) or “relative qualifi-
cation” (quidquid ad aliquid dicitur) does not suffice to constitute a “separate
order” (Irénée Chevalier). However, such was the initial project of the bishop
of Hippo. To consider merely the relentless energy with which Augustine
tried to evade both pure substantialism and simple accidentality—no one
can reasonably deny at least the validity of the attempt (book V). But to fol-
low this hypothesis to its end, that is, to exclude completely substance from
theology, would only, according to Saint Augustine, lead the [doctrine of the]
Trinity toward the final point of failure: “Let the Son be qualified as essence
[ut essentia] in a relative sense to the Father [relative ad Patrem]” (book
VII).63 The ultimate consequence would be to return to a total reversal of the
Aristotelian scheme of the categories that would render “essence” or “sub-
stance” itself relative to relation, which in the Stagirite is actually the support
of relation. It would then receive being and permanence only in and by such
a mode of attribution: “But in order to return to the question,” concludes
the bishop of Hippo, thus achieving a definitive closing of the way that was
opened, “if essence itself is taken in a relative sense [si ipsa essentia relative
dicitur], then essence is no longer essence [essentia ipsa non est essentia].”64
That “essence would no longer be essence” (essentia non est essentia)—not
distinguished here from “substance” by Saint Augustine [“in our language
(in Latin) essence and substance are commonly synonyms”]65—is completely
impossible for the Doctor of Hippo. Such a liberation of the category of rela-
tion from the scheme of substance—in the Aristotelian sense of ousia rather
than the Thomist sense of existentia (we will return to this shortly)—will be
realized only later in modern philosophy and will define its very task. Thus
Descartes, who by the “inversion of categories” in the Regulae, holds that
“absolute and relative are themselves relative terms” in their “relation to us.”
Then Husserl, who, in completing the hypothesis, also reduced the passage of
the cogito to the res cogitans, and renders relation itself relative to a simple
act of consciousness. In this sense and this sense alone, the ad aliquid will
be act rather than thing—a deliverance which is already played out, as I will
demonstrate, in the interpretation of “conversion” as mode of “reduction” in
Meister Eckhart (see chap. 3).66
The Unexpected and the Absurd. The hypothesis of an exit from the cat-
egories, or the notion of an “essence itself relative,” which therefore “would
no longer be essence,” remains, for Augustine at least, just as unexpected in
its decisiveness (inopinatissimus) as it is absurd in its reasoning (absurdum).
First, the unexpected decision is like the warrior who, in Latin terms,
attacks by surprise the one who has not kept on his guard (inopinatum). To
say that “essence is not essence” (ut ipsa essentia no sit essentia) assumes a
meaning all the more “unforeseen or unexpected” (inopinatissimus sensus) as
such a possibility always remains, at least as understood in a pre-Cartesian
tradition, unthought and unthinkable.67 The decision to close the hypothesis
of an absolute primacy of relation over substance does not uniquely consist
here merely in not tolerating the possibility that an essence is able to be taken
in a “relative” sense: this goes for “all essences” (omnis essentia), for example
when one designates the attribution of the relative “master” to the substance
“man” (the master), while master itself can also designate a substance.68
The closure of the hypothesis finds its key, furthermore, in the definitive
refusal of a designation of “essence itself” (ipsa essentia), in its nature, as
40 God
“relative”—which would be a suppression of “nature” itself. According to

Saint Augustine—and this should be understood in the “realist” mode of the
Aristotelian categories—if there is not some “thing” (quid) to which relation
is (as it were) related, then “relation” itself is suppressed.
The absurd or the non-sense, for the bishop of Hippo as for all Greek
metaphysics, leads to the point of thinking for example “man” or “horse,”
said to “exist by themselves,” as terms themselves relative. For, “if there was
no man, that is, a substance, then there would be no person to call ‘master’
in the relative sense (and) if the horse was not an essence, there would be
no occasion for speaking of a ‘draft horse’ in a relative sense.”69 The refusal
to speak of the “essence itself” (ipsa essentia) in a relative sense, thus put-
ting to the test the very categories of the discourse from which it derives,
finds its source therefore in the resistance of an ontology that is completely
Aristotelian, according to which, as the Stagirite expresses it: “it is evidently
necessary that, if one knows a relative in a definite way, then one knows also
in a definite way that to which it is relative.”70 Because to render “essence
itself relative” is immediately to suppress the very support of all relation and
at the same time to invalidate all predication, the resistance of an ontology of
substance is forced into condemning as non-sense, or even as absurd (absur-
dum), the hypothesis of an absolute primacy and of an autarchy of relation
over substance: “To give to substance a relative sense would be an absurdity
[absurdum],” asserts Saint Augustine, “because everything subsists by rela-
tion to itself [omnis res ad se ipsam subsistit]. How much more so with God
[quanto magis Deus]?”71
Our concern now appears fully evident. The tension of the metaphysical
and the theological is held within the “force of resistance” of metaphysics
itself. Would it be necessary to win the combat, and even to enter into the
battle—as if the philosopher in his autonomy would always accuse theology
of attempting its so-called annexation? In a new way here the position of the
Doctor of Hippo has something to teach us. Because, far from demanding
either an “exit from metaphysics” or a “de-theologization of philosophy,” the
study of medieval philosophy today finds in reality its meaning in the act of
the “theologization of metaphysics itself.” Of course, this is not to take leave
of philosophy, as is sometimes wrongly believed, but rather on the contrary to
remain and attempt the transformation of philosophy from within. Certainly,
and I have emphasized, the “other language” of philosophy, and of phenome-
nology in particular, retains its meaning—especially in the sense that it brings
to light new concepts (infra). But the dependence of metaphysics itself on
theology—not to be confused with the innovation of phenomenology rela-
tive to the corpus of metaphysics and theology—is probably, in the first place
at least, that which renders the “exit” all the more awkward as it remains
always impregnated by that on which it depends, namely, metaphysics itself.
The “other language” of that which is to come in the present work—the
phenomenon (Erigena), the reduction (Meister Eckhart), the visibility of the
flesh (Irenaeus), its consistency (Tertullian), and its conversion (Bonaven-

ture), intersubjectivity (Origen), its angelic model (Thomas Aquinas), and its
singularity (Duns Scotus)—on the contrary stems from this very tension of
metaphysics and theology.
In the context of philosophy, “absolute and relative” would never have in
this sense been called “relative themselves in their relation to us,” as in Des-
cartes (supra), if for example Augustine had not first attempted, in a mainly
theological way, to think the “ad aliquid” as pure relation in the Trinity in
book V of De Trinitate. As often happens in the history of philosophy, the
modification of concepts pass by God first in order then to be applied to man
(we will see the exemplary way in which the status of alterity in contempo-
rary accounts derives from the status of angels in the Middle Ages [chap. 8]).
In this sense one does not have to regret that the bishop of Hippo in his De
Trinitate had related “relation” (book V) to “substance” as its only possible
support (book VII) since this covering over makes patently clear, if not the exit
of theology from metaphysics, at least their necessary and insoluble tension.
The Categorical Function of Relation. The question imposes itself with insis-
tence. Faced with the prohibition of an essence itself relative, and as much
“unexpected” as “absurd,” is there still a way to bring the gesture to its term
and to liberate definitively relation (secundum relativum) as a separate order?
Otherwise said, could the bishop of Hippo not have broken under the weight
of an ontology of substance and be delivered from the force of its resistance?
Even though not envisagable according to an Aristotelian scheme, the only
operation which had perhaps allowed, if not the liberation, at least the unty-
ing of “relation” enchained to “substance,” had been that which does not
accord (as book V does) “absolute qualification” to substance, and therefore
implicitly does not accord “relative qualification” to a categorical function.
Two reasons, however, prohibit such an emancipation: a dogmatic and a
polemical one. First, the dogmatic reason: the father-son “relation” intro-
duces an asymmetry of correlation (the impossible inversion of terms)72 not
suggested by the Aristotelian model of “pros ti” which is based on the recip-
rocal relation among friends or neighbors.73 Because it would be necessary
to respect the equality of the divine persons, and that this asymmetry puts
it in danger for Saint Augustine, the equality takes the step beyond asym-
metry and therefore asserts substance over relation.74 The polemical reason:
the question precisely of the equality of the divine persons, largely presented
in the polemic of book VI of De Trinitate75 against the Arian inequality,76
confers a certain occasional character and a primarily heuristic origin to the
conceptualization of relation in Saint Augustine. As Irénée Chevalier has
rightly emphasized, this explains, perhaps, why “relation is never presented
for itself, as a prolonging of the reflection for the sake of satisfying the legiti-
mate avidity of the spirit (but) rather gives the impression of being unilateral
and incomplete.”77
42 God
Where is the significance of the discovering of “relation” (ad aliquid) but

in the very incompleteness of the thought, at least in its quasi-immediate
recovering? “Above all let us maintain,” states the bishop of Hippo, “that
every absolute qualification of this sovereign and divine sublimity has a sub-
stantial signification; however [autem], a relative qualification pertains not to
the order of substance but to relation.”78 How, indeed, by a simple juxtaposi-
tion of two types of attribution (autem) and in the enigmatic conciseness of
the formula, no more or no longer to connect from then on relation to sub-
stance as its necessary substrate, even though it would happen, moreover, by
extraction and transfer, which as we have seen, is neither categorical nor acci-
dental? The tension remains here insoluble as it stands between, on the one
side, the introduction of the term of relation—against the aporias of Arian-
ism (tritheism and divine mutability)—that is neither substance nor accident,
and, on the other side, the retro-application of relation to substance as its
support and necessary foundation (distinction between absolute and relative
qualification). Non-categorical as far as name (book V)—“in God nothing
is said to be according to accident . . . it does not follow, however, that
every attribution has a substantial sense . . . , there is also relation”79—the
“ad aliquid” does not remain less as an ordinary category as to its function
(book VII): “if there was no . . . substance, there would no longer be one who
could be named in the relative sense.”80 The discovery of the theological in
book V for the sake of properly speaking of the Trinity (the ad aliquid) gives
way under the weight of metaphysics in book VII in always connecting it
to a “quid” capable of justifying the question of “quid tres sunt?”81 In Saint
Bonaventure et l’entrée de Dieu en théologie, I have shown that Augustine’s
avowal of a quasi-failure to say what there is to the notion of person—“one
indeed answers three persons [tres personae], not that it might be spoken,
but that we might not remain with nothing to say [non ut illud diceretur sed
ne taceretur]”82—comes not from the impossibility of giving an intelligible
account of persona in order to articulate the Trinitas, but from the question
which is posed (quid?) from the beginning. One will probably have to wait
until the interrogation of “quid tres sunt?” of Augustine passes progressively
to that of the “quis tres sunt?” in Richard of Saint Victor and the “quomodo
tres sunt?” of Bonaventure in order for the “empire of the ti esti” which
governs metaphysics and theology even now to be finally and definitively
developed.83
Relation in Becoming
Subsistent Relation. By means of an overly rapid reading, one would wrongly
accuse Aquinas’s notion of “subsistent relation” (relatio subsistens) of simply
achieving the work of substantial recovering begun by Augustine—the first
term distinguishing the persons (“relation”) and the second unifying them
in a single essence (“subsistent”). Certainly, to define with Thomas Aquinas
in the Summa Theologiae the “divine person” (persona divina) as a “rela-

tion as subsisting” (relationem ut subsistentem) is to pose the relation as
“mode of subsisting” or as “way of substance” (modum substantiae) (1a q.
29).84 But for Aquinas substance is not only “mode of subsistence” or “dwell-
ing,” despite the etymology of the term (sub-sistens) and Heidegger’s error
in interpreting it.85 The Summa in reality states the inverse, at least when it
understands the definition of the being of God as “act of existence” (Aquinas)
and not “mode of subsistence” (the false accusation of Heidegger): “Being
[esse] is said in two ways,” insists the author of the Summa, “in a first sense
in order to designate the act of existence [actum essendi], in a second sense it
indicates the composition of a proposition [compositionem propositionis] . . .
If one takes Being in the first sense, we can neither understand God’s being
[esse Dei] nor God’s essence [nec eius essentiam]” (1a q. 3).86 The debate
concerning being—“with” or “without” being—is well-known and there is
no need to revisit it here, except perhaps to insert into the debate the specifici-
ties of “relation” in the Trinity. This much, moreover, is accomplished by its
author, Jean-Luc Marion, who, in a famous retraction, made the point. God
without being, most fully understood in Thomas Aquinas, is not understood
as a God without “acts of being” but only of a God whose being would be
falsely extended to the “community of entities” of all beings. Said otherwise,
Thomistic being itself paradoxically escapes “the prism of onto-theology,”
however sought and hardly ever found (see the “Introduction”).87
Far from being relieved or resolved, the tension of metaphysics and the-
ology therefore remains understood in Thomas Aquinas. Or rather, it is
reinforced all the more as it is stated in the language of being (esse). And thus
the transformation penetrates into its mold: it is no longer only ousia as “sub-
s tance” or “mode of subsisting” which pertains to theology when God enters
into philosophy (Aristotle perhaps), but existence as “act of being,” that is to
say, as gift before being, or better as gift for being (Thomas Aquinas). Aris-
totelian “substance” is distinguished from the Thomist “act of being,” for
that which is hypothetically true of ousia according to Martin Heidegger—
“being receives the imprint of the presence and the consistence in the sense
of subsistence (ousia)”88—will never be the esse essendi of Thomas Aquinas.
Aristotle’s “being in act” is never identified with the “act of being” of Thomas
Aquinas, precisely because the second gives in order to be while the first is in
order to give.89
The exit from metaphysics—the detachment and then reattachment of the
category of “relation” to the substance/accident pair—paradoxically operates
within metaphysics itself, at least when it passes through the filter of medi-
eval philosophy. Similar to the ruse of the hedgehog (in Grimm’s fairy tale)
placing his hedgehog wife at the finish and passing himself off as “already
there” wherever the hare runs, metaphysics is therefore “always there” when
theology is tried within it—but the difference is that the second totally modi-
fies the first (primacy of relation over substance in Saint Augustine), all the
44 God
while serving it (modification of the concept of substance of “being” in Aris-

totle to the “act of being” in Aquinas).90 The metaphysical categories “are
transformed [mutantur] when applied to God” (Boethius).91 Theology does
not destroy them in order to pass to another order, but only works from
within them in order to attempt to render them adequate, as far as possible,
to the novelty of the object studied: the Triune, and therefore relational (ad
aliquid) God.
Extension of Relation. One cannot reproach in this sense Thomas Aquinas,

as some do, for having falsely separated God and the world, the immanent
Trinity and economic Trinity, God ad intra (Ia, q. 2–43) and God ad extra (Ia
q. 44–119). A unified reading of the Prima Pars of the Summa, starting from
the concept of relation, shows on the contrary, in the ad aliquid, the commu-
nity of relation of God to himself (ad intra) as also to the world (ad extra).
The personal God defined as “subsistent relation” (relatio subsistens) in the
treatise on the Trinity (Ia. Q. 29) is also the God who is author of the world
thought as “relation” (relatio) in the treatise on creation: “creation posits
something in created beings, but only according to relation [secundum relati-
onem]” (Ia q. 45).92 The homonymy of “relation” here, in the double relation
of God to himself (Trinity) and to the world (creation) posits a “dependence
[dependentia] of created being to the principle that has established it” such
that the category of “relation” (relatio) designates what is proper to the “cre-
ation” (creatio): “creatio est de genere relationis” (Contra Gentiles, II, 18).93
Far from the false accusations of Heidegger concerning a creation thought
as “production,” to which we will have occasion to return,94 in Aquinas the
extension of “relational” relation that defines the Trinitarian structure of God
himself (the person) to his relation to the world (creation) holds together in
unity the Deus ad intra and Deus ad extra, immanent and economic Trinity,
God in himself (per se) and God for us (pro nobis). The tension of the meta-
physical and the theological does not appear here to be resolved but rather
extended. Relation and substance: the connection between them applies
not only to the Trinity (Saint Augustine), but also to the creation (Thomas
Aquinas).
Negation of Relation. However, a question remains, which could allow

contemporary philosophy to interrogate medieval philosophy, and its modi-
fication of the Aristotelian scheme in the name of God’s entry into theology
(Trinity). The category of “relation,” as is well known, is now largely utilized
by every history of philosophy, to such a degree that its primacy over sub-
stance, at least at the opening of book V of Augustine’s De Trinitate (and
covered again in book VII), seems today to have become the common cur-
rency of phenomenology—for example, in Emmanuel Levinas: “Being before
the existent, ontology before metaphysics . . . The terms must be reversed,” one
reads in Totality and Infinity. “This ‘saying to the Other’—this relationship
with the Other as interlocutor, this relation with an existent—precedes all

ontology; it is the ultimate relation in being. Ontology presupposes meta-
physics.”95 In short, and the issue is clear at least since the Levinasian reversal
of Heidegger’s comprehension of being where the other is subsumed as one
among other categories: relation definitively outweighs substance (agreement
with Heidegger on the refusal of reification) and metaphysics as relation over
ontology as much as being (the difference between Heidegger and Levinas).
The tension of the categories of classical metaphysics (substance/accident)
with Augustinian Trinitarian theology (discovery of relation as first cate-
gory), does not therefore seem resolved (with no solution found or sought),
but does at least seem surpassed (in a definitive exit from substantialism).
The deliverance of relation from the prism of ontology, commencing with
Saint Augustine, is certainly accomplished with Levinas, but pays the price of
a strong secularization of relation, where, now, it “would be false to qualify
this metaphysical relation [in the Levinasian meaning of the term] as theo-
logical” (Levinas).96
One reaches then the questioning that now must be raised, albeit for the
renewal of the concept of the Trinity: “The relation [rapport] to the Other
[in Levinas] is thematized on several occasions as a relation [relation]. By
what right does one use here a category eminently ordained for ontology in
order to attain that which, par excellence, is supposed to escape ontology?”
(Marion).97 The quest at least has the merit of “pushing” the hypothesis “to
its end”: that is, of extricating it from its last entrenchments and exhausting
its possibilities. If it is a matter here of unraveling the relation of substance, or
better of ordering ontology to an alterology, would it not be fitting to elimi-
nate the usage of “relation” completely, since its term always supposes some
external poles that it does not intend, and a sort of “overhanging attitude”
[attitude de surplomb] which is not fitting for the veritable “Conciliation”
(Austrag) of being and the existent? The interrogation is certainly radical, but
is at least worth being raised. Otherwise said, and in our own proper terms:
would not the “metaphysical relation” in the Levinasian sense of the term
(alterology) actually be “metaphysical” in the classical sense of the term (rela-
tion between poles)? Whether by inverting the categories (primacy of relation
over substance) or exiting from them (alterology without ontology), is it not
true that one still remains a slave to metaphysical categories themselves by
dint of always using them?
It is clear that the tension between the metaphysical (substance) and the
theological (relation) in Saint Augustine, or of Levinasian metaphysics (alter-
ology) and Heideggerian ontology (conciliation), is far from being weakened
and even less dissolved. The exercise of philosophy always remains precisely
to be said in a language which is hardly sufficient for it, as if words are
never able to suffice, particularly when it is a matter of speaking of God.
To pass to the “other language” (as I have emphasized) that negates neither
the tension nor accepts onto-theology except as a “prism” for thought (see
46 God
the “Introduction”), one comes perhaps to accept the displacement (meta-

phorein) while at the same time believing oneself still capable of predication
concerning God, particularly relation itself: “It would be necessary for us
to understand that this category of relation [hanc categoriam relationis],”
indicates Erigena, whose radical apophaticism will now be our focus (chap.
2), “following the other categories [sicut et ceteras], is also predicable of God
only in a metaphorical sense [translative].” Indeed, the Carolingian continues,
displaying an insightful understanding of the aporia of Saint Augustine’s De
Trinitate, “the category of relation will no longer be counted among the ten
kinds of category, if it becomes predicable in the sense proper to God [si pro-
prie de Deo dicitur].”98
Thought is radicalized when it attempts to say something new. The price to

pay is certainly a tendency to reject everything else. Such is, however, not the
gesture of phenomenology nor of medieval philosophy itself—in which case
it would be necessary for us to continue the interrogation of tradition and to
dialogue with our own modernity. It would be a matter therefore of speaking
“God” (1st part) before describing the “flesh” (2nd part) and of clarifying
the structures of the “other” (3rd part). The tension of the metaphysical and
theological in Saint Augustine (chap. 1) passes then to the phenomenological
in John Scotus Erigena (chap. 2), in order finally to be found in the reduction
at work in the concept of conversion in Meister Eckhart (chap. 3). After the
attempt of an exit from metaphysics as complex as it is difficult to carry out
(Augustine), the God of Christianity is revealed now as a “phenomenon”
in the double meaning of the term: phenomenologically, on the one hand,
and in its everyday sense on the other (Erigena). The God of Christianity
is “God phenomenon” in the sense that, phenomenologically speaking, he
“appears [apparuit]” and “is manifest” (phaînô) according to a strange cor-
respondence between theophany in Erigena (Periphyseon) and the definition
of phenomenology in Martin Heidegger (Sein und Zeit). And the God of the
Christians is also a “phenomenon” in the current sense of the term, in the
measure that he sometimes shows, I suggest, an individuality such that we
are dazzled at the humility in the mystery of the incarnate Word: “Do not be
surprised that the flesh, that is, mortal man, is capable by grace to become
a child of God, when it is even more miraculous [maioris miraculi] that the
Word is made flesh” (Erigena).99
Chapter 2
God Phenomenon (John Scotus Erigena)
The transition through the displacement and overcoming (chap. 2) of the cate-
gory of “relation” (chap. 1) simply does not work. For if it is necessary “to say
something in order not to be left saying nothing at all” (Augustine), then what
we have just said (“relation,” as specific to the Trinity, was always referring to
substance) could be rendered mute if we were content to speak “metaphori-
cally” about God, without ever ascribing anything to him “literally” (Erigena).
The tension of metaphysics and theology certainly appears indissoluble, but its
resolution will not come through its denial, which bears the opposite risk of
destroying what we had yet to build: this progressive measuring of the force of
resistance of substance, which is impossible, or at least very difficult, to surpass
(chap. 1). The other way remains (chap. 2): not a way that forgets the dialogue
with metaphysics, but one which maintains it, so much so that it opens onto
“another phenomenality,” or even better, onto a new mode of speech. Interest-
ing indeed. John Scotus Erigena is not the kind of thinker who claims absolute
novelty. His deep knowledge of Greek, so rare in the Carolingian epoch, on
the contrary, makes him particularly suitable for our discussion, if also rather
controversial. In this sense, and this sense alone, if there is a necessary exit
from ontology toward phenomenology—speaking from within the framework
of a contemporary rereading of the Erigenian corpus—then it is precisely in
this sense that the debate about the divine is all the more “ontologized” (meta-
physics) as it causes another figure to appear, that of a “phenomenalized” God
(theophany): “It is not only the divine essence [essentia divina] that connotes
the word God,” emphasizes Erigena, gesturing toward a radical break, “but
also this mode [sed modus ille] under which God is shown [ostendit] to the
intellectual and rational creature . . . which is frequently also called God by
Holy Scripture. The Greeks are accustomed to calling this mode a theophany
[theophania], that is, an appearance of God [hoc est Dei apparitio].”1
Theophany and Phenomenology

We must nevertheless be careful here. In proposing the mediation of essence
(essentia) by theophany (theophania), or of the ontic (quid) by this mode
47
48 God
(modus ille) of the appearance of God, the exiting from metaphysics is not
simplified. Far from it. On the contrary, it is now further in question. What
is new in Erigena (chap. 2) relative to Saint Augustine (chap. 1) is not the
pursuit of a convolution of the Aristotelian model of the categories, at the
risk of totally transforming it in order to adapt it to the Trinity (see Thomas
Aquinas, above). It is an act, rather, of a “paradigm shift,” as in the celebrated
distinction of “ordinary science” and “science in crisis” of Thomas Kuhn.2
There where one (Thomas Aquinas) perfects the model of “relation” even to
the extension of the Trinity to the entire creation, the other (Erigena) bursts
the paradigm itself—preferring theophanies to categories, modes of being to
being, and the phenomenal to the substantial: “Behold an example of this
theophany,” states the Carolingian, “ ‘I see the Lord sitting’ (Is. 6:1), and
other analogous formulae, since it is not the essence of God [non est essentia
Dei] that the prophet sees, but a theophany [theophania] created by Him.”3
With Erigena therefore, a further step is somehow made. We do not remain
in the sphere of the metaphysics of the categories (Augustine, Thomas Aqui-
nas), nor do we require the notion of the ineffable in order somehow “to
think the unthinkable” (Denys the Areopagite).4 The Erigenian theophany is
distinguished from Dionysian apophaticism (to which we will return), on the
one hand, insofar as it argues with metaphysics in order to be divested of it
rather than setting it aside by ignoring it, and, on the other hand, insofar as
it orients all movement of divine kenosis toward its carnal incarnation, and
further, that it withdraws into the dazzlement of its unthinkable distance
(see part II, “The Flesh”). With John Scotus Erigena one certainly exits from
the tension of metaphysics and theology, since theophany, in the guise of the
Christian mode of phenomenology, somehow mediates by thirds in order to
transgress duality. But the exit is not accomplished by virtue of a “jump,”
no more than it makes use of biblical categories in order to play against the
Hellenic. Inheriting in a unique way the logica vetus (old logic) of Boethius
(evidently ignored by Denys), Erigena struggles anew with Aristotelian cat-
egories. As I will demonstrate, it is better to say that he “destroys” or rather
“deconstructs” them, not by rejecting them according to this or that position,
but by repudiating any “position itself” as still a mode of reification and
seeking to think somehow “beyond all affirmation and negation.” In short,
apophaticism is not the only discourse coming out of theology to be able to
“play” with phenomenology.5 “Theophany” proposes another partner, more
worthy and even more fit for a radical engagement. Hence, the etymological
work on the Greek term “theoyphania” by the pen of John Scotus Erigena is
probably capable of rivaling, or at least of foreshadowing, certain later phe-
nomenological works which could even implicitly depend on it (Heidegger):
“And it is fitting to notice,” emphasizes the Erigenian in a paradoxical preface
to his translation of Denys, “that theophany is virtually able to be interpreted
as THEOYPHANIA, that is, as appearance of God or illumination of God;
God Phenomenon 49
if it is true that everything that appears shines and is derived from the word
PHAINÔ, that is, I shine or I appear.”6
“Everything that appears shines [omne quod apparet lucet] and comes
from the verb phainô [et a verbo phainô derivatur], that is, I shine or I appear
[id est luceo vel appareo]” (Erigena). The informed reader, of course, would
see here Heidegger’s definition of the “phenomenon” as recorded in para-
graph 7 of Sein und Zeit: “that which shows itself, manifests itself.” For
Heidegger likewise derives the definition of the phenomenon from the Greek
“phainesthai” (to show itself) and from its root “phainô” (“to disclose,”
“bring to light”). Perhaps it is the case after all that theology has something
to say to phenomenology concerning visibility or manifestation (theophany
as mode of phenomenality), if not also the inverse.7
“The astonishment of Erigena’s contemporaries before this immense meta-
physical epic, manifestly unbelievable,” according to Etienne Gilson,8 only
intensifies for us moderns who, on the one hand, often see in the Carolingian
era a simple step of transition or “middle age” between the church fathers
and the Scholastics, and on the other hand, find in Erigena that which we
have been looking for elsewhere: the sense of a phenomenality freed from
an essentialist metaphysic. We will not explore the relation of Erigena to
Heidegger any further here, in order not to fall into a crude anachronism,
nor will we pass directly from Denys to Erigena, at least in order no longer
to make one (Erigena) the simple servant of the other’s thought (Denys), as
is often thought. We are thus compelled to return to Erigena himself pre-
cisely in his distance from the Areopagite, and to shed light on some of the
most contemporary phenomenological applications. Sometimes an unfaith-
ful translator despite his declaration of principles, Erigena was in this sense
rather preoccupied with “justifying his own teaching” or of “understanding
Denys better” rather than simply “making Denys intelligible to the Latins” as
in the formula of Albert the Great devoted to Aristotle.9
From the Apophatic to the Meta-Ontological
The Apophatic: The Deviation from Denys

Distance and Proximity. John Scotus Erigena is too often reduced to per-
forming the simple role of “translator” or “introducer” of negative theology
into the Latin world. Of course, it is the case that he explicitly claims this
for himself at the beginning of his commentary on the Celestial Hierarchies
of Denys. Fearful of being castigated as an “unfaithful translator” (ne forte
culpam infidi interpretis incurram), he puts on the hat of literal translator of
the Dionysian corpus (called interpres in Latin) and not of commentator or
exegete who would be introducing his own personal touch to the works: “If
you judge my text to be obscure and less evident than the aforementioned
50 God
interpretation,” he confesses with circumspection, “then you see me as the

translator of this work [interpretem huius operis] and not its commentator
[non expositorem].”10 But in spite of such declarations, the Irishman does not
remain any less an interpreter (expositor) of the Dionysian corpus in the Eng-
lish sense of the word—insofar as his attempt at transcription far outstrips
and goes beyond the preceding translation of Hilduin: “John Scotus presents a
translation such that nothing appears to contradict his essential theses.”11 Out
of his (own) theses, that of an exit from affirmation and negation, no longer
by means of the ineffable transcendence of eminence (Denys) but rather by the
carnal immanence of a shining theophany, is probably his most original con-
tribution: “This notion of theophany controls perhaps the entire economy of
Erigenism.”12 In Erigena, a proximity of man to God establishes itself, there-
fore, somehow by means of the theophanic modes of divine manifestation,
precisely where Denys always maintains a distance in his apophasis. In Erig
ena, negative theology is not (only) a hermeneutical question about the status
of discourse and its possible overcoming, but first a phenomenological affair
about visibility and its possible transcription in terms of its capacity to be
described. The point of difference between Erigena and Denys is that Erigena
neither “liberates Christian theological concepts from their Greek horizon,”
nor maintains God in “the unthinkable distance of his dazzlement.”13
It is well known that Denys was the first to distinguish the apophatic from
the cataphatic, the way of negation from the way of affirmation (thus making
here negation not the inverse of affirmation but beyond any position whether
affirmative or negative).14 Erigena, however, “emphasized the distinction with
more insistence and vigor than Denys”15—to the point of consecrating for
the first time in history these two ways no longer as two modes of thought
in general (Denys), but as two unique branches, if not of, theology itself, at
least of a constituted “discipline”: “Mystical theology [mystica theologia] is
divided into two general branches of a logical discipline [in duas maximas
logicae disciplinae dividitur partes], that is to say, into cataphatic on the one
hand and apophatic on the other [cataphicam plane et apophaticam], which
correspond respectively to Being and non-Being [id est, in esse et non esse].
In this context, one should utilize the rules of analysis [analyticae artis], and
Denys very clearly warns us that we can only reach the truth through the
practice of the privation [per privationem omnium] of everything that comes
back into the field of discourse or thought in order better to reach the super-
eminence of his Essence.”16
The Ontologization of the Debate. The terms of the division already no lon-
ger correspond to those in force in Denys. The transfer of the cataphatic
onto “Being [in esse]” and of the apophatic onto “non-Being [et non esse]”
produces an ontologization of the debate proper to the Erigenian, insofar as
Being and non-Being no longer appear exclusively as categories to overcome
(in the same capacity, for example, as the knowable and non-knowable in
God Phenomenon 51
Denys) but are identified here explicitly with the affirmative and negative
ways.17 Besides the influence of Boethius and his celebrated Latin introduc-
tion of the term “nature” (natura) to mean “being” (esse),18 the principle
reason for this ontologization of negative theology in Erigena from the begin-
ning of his Periphyseon is to fully establish this “metaphysical epic” as a
treatise of theology engaged with and in tune with the “things which are”
(ea quae sunt) and “those which are not” (ea quae non sunt): “The principle
and fundamental division of all things into either that which can be perceived
by the intellect or that which surpasses its scope, occurs between that which
is [ea quae sunt] and that which is not [ea quae non sunt]. I have chosen to
designate all things [omnium] by this generic term that is translated by phusis
in Greek [graece phusis] and by natura in Latin [latine vero natura].”19
The allegation of “pantheism” to the philosophy of the Irishman is cus-
tomarily insisted on and probably overdone. Besides the mistaken character
of such a judgment, which confuses identification and expression in the rela-
tion between God and the world (to which we will return), this reading of
Erigenian exegesis from the single side of natura masks and obscures the
debate which it maintains with what philosophy will later name ontologia. In
the Erigenian, the ontological formulation of the way of affirmation in terms
of “being” and of the way of negation in terms of “non-being,” even if the
super-eminence of Non-Being would not be identified with the simple nega-
tion of affirmation, originally marks (despite the anachronism here) a will
“to construct an agathology or a henology and not at all an ontotheology.”20
Where today’s exegetes of philosophy still strive to determine the non-onto-
theological aspects of this or that author, whom I measure by the yardstick
of this first part [God], we can properly bring John Scotus Erigena to bear
on a debate now neither overestimated nor arbitrary in the sense, at the very
least, of an “ontologization of the debate,” either on the side of being (way of
affirmation), or on the side of non-being (way of negation). To define a mode
of discourse (logos) which is not reduced to a simple metaphysics of presence
and which would yet be in dialogue with it—such is the originality of the
Irishman here (chap. 2). In this way he definitely takes leave of the categories
of substance always left in operation by the bishop of Hippo (chap. 1).21
The Nihilation of Eminence. Besides the ontologizaton of negative theology,

a second operation that is only its ultimate consequence also marks Erige-
nian apophaticism in an exemplary way: the nihilation [néantisation] of the
Dionysian way of eminence. It is very well known that the way of eminence
defining “negative” theology in Denys does not remain within affirmation
and negation, but on the contrary, provides, properly speaking, a third way.
Briefly, the originality of the Areopagite beyond all his predecessors, includ-
ing the tenets of the Platonic epekeina tês ousias (Republic, VI, 509 b), is
that he not only posits a beyond to essence, but draws it outside of the ruts
that its position (or non-position) presupposes: “In itself the supreme Cause
52 God
remains perfectly transcendent to all privation since it is situated beyond

every position either negative or affirmative.”22 But a great danger (already
understood by Denys) remains, specifically of positing “the beyond of all
negative or positive position” (uper pasan kai aphairesin kai thesin) in the
very mode of position which was surpassed: “To say that God is totally
other,” asks Jean-Claude Foussard in a judicious reading of Erigena, “is it not
still to determine him as another of the same?”23 In this sense, God appears
here less beyond being (Denys) than (as he is in reality) otherwise than being
(Erigena)—meaning that in relation to “being” God does not uniquely tran-
scend all position, but adopts another mode according to which he is not
now qualified by a determination of the positional type, as remains the case
in the mere overcoming of being.
The reduction to nothing of eminence (or of the beyond) leads eminence
thus to drop itself into the nothing (or non-being), as God is no longer counted
among the collection of “things which are” (ea quae sunt) but reveals on the
contrary “those which (precisely) are not” (ea quae non sunt) in the mode
of being. God “is not,” not in the sense that he is not being, but in the sense
alone that he is not in the ordinary mode of being: “When we say that God is
[unde Deum esse dicentes], we do not mean that God is according to a deter-
mined modality [non aliquo modo esse dicimus] . . . Because God escapes the
comprehension of every reason and intellect, and when we predicate Being
of him [praedicantes ipsius esse], we do not want to say that God would
himself be Being [non dicimus ipsum esse], because Being proceeds from God
[ex ipso enim esse], but God in himself is not Being [sed nom ipsum esse].”24
The God who “is not being” (non ipsum esse) is uniquely “not,” precisely
as a “God who does not have to Be, but loves,” in a surpassing that at its
summit is very Dionysian.25 The “overhang” [surplomb] (Merleau-Ponty)
of ontology by agathology does not have the same sense in Erigena as in
the Areopagite. For Denys the Good explicitly marks the passage to another
properly divine order—charity; for Erigena it designates God as “Non being,”
that is, as “nothingness.” God should be understood to be “eminent” here in
the sense that his superiority is of not being according to the current modality
of beings: “The divine Goodness [bonitas divinae], when one considers that it
subsists in itself, is non-being [neque est], has always been non-being [neque
erat], and will always not be [neque erit]. Because the divine Goodness is still
left unknowable by the intelligence of every existing being, it still exceeds
everything that exists . . . Since the divine Goodness remains unknowable by
every intelligence, we have not erred in giving him the name of Nothingness
by eminence [per excellentiam nihilum non immerito vocitatur].”26
Beyond Denys (who, in not explicitly dialoguing with ontology, has not
as such thought Non-being) and beyond Boethius (who never extended the
concept of nature from the affirmation of being to its negation), the Erigenian
Non-being therefore originally designates neither a default nor a privation of
being, but the excellence or eminence of the One who is not according to the
God Phenomenon 53
ordinary mode of being—albeit in his eminence itself. Where Denys still thinks
a beyond being by charity in the way of eminence, Erigena radicalizes it by
making the Good itself the eminence of unsurpassable Nothingness (“Noth-
ingness by eminence”). God is “without being” in the sense of the being of
“Without,” that is to say, as pure Non-being or “Nothingness by eminence”
(per excellentiam nihilum) to the degree that nothing remains in the formu-
lation of his divinity except the Nothing of everything that pertains to the
ordinary mode of simple entities. Eminence itself, or that which is ordinarily
named the third way in Denys (via eminentiae), will therefore paradoxically
not conserve its eminence in Erigena, except as its very negation as eminence,
at least in the sense of a “super-position” beyond every position and negation.
Since to posit a “Beyond essence” is not immediately to exit from the mode
of essentiality that it seems to surpass, “the prefixes super or more than in
Erigena do not at all imply a way of eminence which would surreptitiously
reintroduce affirmation at the heart of negation itself.”27 In a different way
than the Areopagite, therefore, however affirmative in its formulation, every
turn or every proposition, whether that of eminence or of the superlative,
will thus be understood by the Irishman to signify in a negative manner: “All
the names which are predicated of God by the addition of prefixes ‘super-’ or
‘more than’ [super vel plusquam] such as Super-essential [superessentialis],
more-than-Truth [plusquam veritas], more-than-Wisdom [plusquam sapien-
tia] and other similar names, form in themselves the full synthesis of the two
aforementioned branches of theology (cataphatic and apophatic); so that,
if in their formulation itself these names adopt the expression of affirma-
tive theology [ita ut in pronuniatione formam affirmativae], in their meaning
these names remain within the meaning inherent to negative theology [in
intellectu vero virtutem abdicativae obtineant].”28
It is not too little to say, therefore, that Erigena, the intentionally unfaith-
ful translator of a Denys whom he makes iridescent out of his own genius,
appears resolutely more negative or apophatic than the Areopagite himself
in his persistent usage of the superlative. Erigena attempts a radicalization of
Denys, not against him, but beyond him—“there where Denys had left some
‘room to play’ or, if you prefer, some indetermination, thanks to which some
interpreters of diverse tendencies have been able to attribute to the Dionysian
doctrine of weaker or stronger doses of negativity.”29 The significance of the
Erigenian nihilation of eminence is not that it is no longer only a matter of
reaching a realm beyond being and non-being by means of the surpassing of
all position in the simple Dionysian hierarchy, but of radicalizing the effort
that Denys had been able to carry out while lacking a true dialogue with
ontology: to think the “otherwise than being” as the unique and veritable
manner of designating the “beyond essence.”30
To affirm that God is the author of a creation ex nihilo, as in Christian
doctrine, allows us to recognize that the nihil or the nothing from which
the world itself is drawn is nothing other than God himself as “Nothing,”
54 God
or “Nothingness” in the sense that he is precisely the nothing, not only of

beings, but also of “things,” which makes up the ordinary mode of beings:
“We believe that God has created everything that exists from nothingness
[de nihilo omnia fecisse]; but what is this nothingness if not that of the One
who . . . is not without reason called a Nothingness by eminence [nihil per
excellentiam] since it is completely impossible to number him among the
collection of all things that exist [in numero omnium quae sunt].”31 Related
to this ontological nihilation in Erigena (chap. 2)—radicalized again by the
reduction from “to nothing” to “to the nothing” [“à rien” au “au rien”] in
Meister Eckhart (chap. 3)—the possibility of another discourse will arise: not
against ontology but beyond it (meta-ontological), in the impossible reifica-
tion of God as well as of man.
The Meta-Ontological: The Impossible Reification

In his debate with ontology and by virtue of the principle of the nihilation of
eminence, Erigena is led by the apophatic toward a sort of “meta-ontology,” at
least in the sense of an overflow of the definition of God as Being in the direc-
tion of his own non-Being: “Negative theology doubles as a meta-ontology
or a meta-ousiology no less negative.”32 However, let us make no mistake: the
metaphysical formulation of the questioning in terms of ontology—or better
of the negation of all ontology—remains properly theological in its aim. God
defined as “Being” or as “Non-Being” truly exits from the ordinary mode of
the existence of things only if he appears as himself starting from himself in
his auto-manifestation. Said otherwise, if “the objective of phenomenology
does not coincide with objectivity,”33 then Erigena has accomplished his goal,
in no other way than by means of his concern to protect God from reification.
God Is Not (Some)Thing. Among the great leitmotifs of medieval

philosophy—from the “aliquid quo nihil majus cogitari possit” (that than
which nothing greater can be conceived) of Anselm to the “cum gratia non
tollat naturam sed perficiat” (grace does not destroy but perfects nature) of
Aquinas34—there is surely one so striking in Erigena that it would also merit
similar notoriety, at least insofar as it accomplishes the program of mak-
ing utterly impossible the reification of the divine: Deus nescit se quid est,
quia non est quid—“God does not know what he is because he is not some
thing.”35 There again a gap widens between Erigena and Denys, so that the
originality of one (Erigena) is always achieved through the ontologization of
the other (Denys). Yet two traits of the non-knowledge of God always remain
common between them: that man is not able to know God because of his
Super-essentiality on the one hand, and that even God is not able to know
himself anymore at least according to the ordinary mode of knowledge, on
the other. Yet the reasons for this double unknowing are not identical in both
thinkers. The nescience of God—of man concerning God (objective genitive)
God Phenomenon 55
and of God concerning himself (subjective genitive)—no longer only empha-

sizes the surpassing of the concept which produces the way of eminence, but
now expresses the radically thing-less status of the divine being: “Because
God is not some-thing [quia non est quid],” he “does not know any-thing
about himself [nescit se quid est].” Otherwise said, the non-reification of the
divine precedes and founds his unknowing. It matters little to Erigena that
God is only “known as unknown” according to the scriptural imperative of
Acts 17 of which the one who calls himself the Areopagite claims to be the
hearer, but instead, for him, its non-determination as (some) thing, that is, as
quid, renders it unknowable because non-reifiable. Erigena attempts to per-
form a quasi-phenomenological reduction of God who “suspends” or “puts
in brackets” his existence itself in the form of quid (non est quid)—a concept
already so pregnant in Augustine (chap. 1)—and opens thus in the direc-
tion [sens] of a new way of being for the divine: as phenomenon, namely, as
manifestation or theophany (chap. 2). Whereas the non-knowledge of God,
posited for epistemological reasons in Denys, continually maintains negative
theology in the realm of discourse or of concept (logos), its nescience draws
it to the side of manifestation, precisely for ontological reasons in Erigena,
who consecrates it first as a mode of de-ontologization: “To posit the ques-
tion ‘what is it?’ [quid],” emphasizes Jean-Claude Foussard with regard to
Erigena, “is to inquire about a definition of the object. But to define is to
determine a being, that is, to posit it immediately in a multiplicity which
encompasses it, making it a being among other beings among which it can
be numbered . . . It is not therefore a failure of some kind that God does not
know what he is, rather, it is more simply because he is nothing definite.”36
Conforming to my original hypothesis and without exceeding the decent
limits of anachronism, a true “reduction” of God paradoxically makes Erigena
one of the first phenomenologists in the context of theology. Like Heidegger’s
“the term ‘Dasein’ which we use to designate this being does not express its
what,” God ignores the (some-)thing that he is or could be (nescit se quid est)
in the sense that he is not or is no longer spoken of according to the mode of
things which are (quia non est quid). Neither “ready to hand” (zuhanden) nor
“present at hand” (vorhanden), God is therefore at least negatively defined as
a mode of opening whose openness [apérité] first negates the ordinary guise
of beingness.37 Negative theology (“God’s not knowing what he is”) doubles
as a negative ontology, or better, as a sort of meta-ontology, which forsakes
being, inasmuch as it is always only said according to the mode of things—
that is, according to the pure and simple presence of its quiddity (“he is not
some thing”). In phenomenology (Heidegger) as in theology (Erigena), the
being of a being “does not appear”—whether of God or man—not because
it is not tout court, but because “it is not itself a being,” at least in the sense
of a being present.38
The non-entitiness [néantité] of God achieved through hard struggle by
the nihilization of the way of eminence in dialogue with ontology, now comes
56 God
to signify the reverse, or rather the impossibility, of inquiring into any “quid-
dity” in the etymological sense of the term (being a quid). Nothing remains
of being except of being nothing—of a being.39 For Erigena, the “reduction to
the Nothing,” as a singular possible escape from the ordinary mode of pres-
ence, is in this way decrypted, although in another sense than in Heidegger
(since it is not here a question of anguish or of any other affective tonality):
“How can the divine nature therefore know itself for what it is [quid sit],
since it is Nothingness [cum nihil sit]? For the divine nature exceeds every
being [superat enim omne quod est], as it is not itself Being [quando nec ipse
est], but as every being proceeds from it [sed ab ipsa est omne esse].”40
Such a divine nothing (cum nihil sit) is not here the simple bottomless
well of a definitively unfathomable deity (das Nichts). This would be closer
to Eckhart later and in this sense more Dionysian than properly Erigenian.41
Rather it marks the impossibility of God himself being conceived and known
as Being, that is, explicitly, as “subsistent.” It is not man who seeks to deliver
God from “substance”—an enterprise that can only be terribly promethean
in light of the insoluble tension between metaphysics and theology—but God
himself who makes an escape. Such an initiative does not consist in breaking
free from metaphysics, at least partially (as for Augustine), but more simply in
resisting all forms of reification which would make of his “person” a “thing”
as if he had to answer to “something [quid]”: “God, who is not an objective
quid [qui non est quid], does not know completely the subsistence in him of
everything that is not himself [omnino ignorare in se ipso quod ipse non est].
But God does not know himself as an objective quid [seipsum autem non
cognoscit aliquid esse].”42 Nothing subsists in God which could define his
“substance,” his permanence. God is not ignorant of his own nature simply
because it would make him inaccessible to himself, as by a failure of power
or knowledge, but only in that he is not himself nature, albeit in an eminent
or Super-essential way: “God does not know what he himself is [nescit itgi-
tur quid ipse est]; God does not know his being [as] an objective quid [hoc
est nescit se quid esse] because God knows that he is absolutely none of the
existent beings which become knowable as subsisting in a subject [quoniam
cognoscit se nullum eorum quae in aliquo cognoscuntur] about which the
quiddity could be put into words or known.”43
But the Erigenian radicalization of the Dionysian corpus, in the twofold
sense of negativity and the ontologization of the debate, does not stop there.
Under the influence of Maximus the Confessor, whom he also translated,
Erigena extends the negativity of God to man himself, in the sense that the
hyper-distance established between man and God in Dionysian apophaticism
is now understood to be rectified by the closest proximity in their likeness in
Maximian exemplarism. “Negative theology” is paradoxically and brilliantly
doubled by a “negative anthropology” in Erigena who makes what seems
to be the most remote for man (God’s unknowing of God) now that which
appears as the closest: the unknowing of man through man.
God Phenomenon 57
Man Is Not (Some)Thing. It is well known that John Scotus Erigena has not
only transmitted (and interpreted) the works of Denys the Areopagite for the
Latin world, but also the works of Maximus the Confessor and Gregory of
Nyssa. From Maximus, vis-à-vis his principle of the extension of the attri-
butes from God to man, Erigena retained this lesson: “Cataphatic theology
does not at all affirm the negations of apophatic theology [et kataphatikê
non confirmet quod apophatikê abnegat], and the apophatic does not at all
negate the affirmations of cataphatic theology [neque apophatikê abneget
quod kataphatikê affirmat]. These two general parts of theology apply not
only to God [non solum in Deum], but even to every creature [sed etiam in
omni creatura] as is shown by eloquent examples.”44
Extending the Christological principle of the communication of idioms
to all of humanity, what pertains to God, according to Erigena, also pertains
therefore to all of humanity, to the degree, at least, that humanity is rendered
capable of receiving it. Such is the meaning of the apophatic mode of self-
k
nowledge which now will not be reserved to God alone (Denys), but will
be extended also to the entire collection of created beings (sed etiam in omni
creaturae)—and thus to the human creature in an exemplary way. In other
words, if “God does not know what he is because he is not something [Deus
nescit se quid est, quia non est quid]” (supra), then humanity will also remain
totally ignorant of its own quiddity) in order not to remain also locked in its
solitary “subsistence” as a thing or being (quid). Erigena states: “Similarly to
that which concerns his Creator, man knows only that God exists [tantum
cognoscit quia est] but does not know that which God is [non autem percipit
quid sit]; similarly also to that which concerns his own nature, man knows
only that he has been created [solummodo definit quia creatus est] but is not
able to know at all how or in which substance he has been created [quomodo
vero vel in qua substantia substitutus est intelligere non potest]. If man knew
in any way whatsoever what he is [si enim quid sit aliquo modo intelligeret],
he would necessarily deviate from the resemblance to his Creator [necessario
a similitudine Creatoris deviaret].”45
The Principle of Resemblance. The principle of resemblance (similitudo) or

the image of God in man—about which we will demonstrate how it models
our carnal invisibility according to Irenaeus (chap. 4)—is found therefore
pushed to the extreme through Erigena’s rereading of Maximus the Confes-
sor. Nothing is prohibited to man in his participation in the divine, including
his impossible consideration of himself through himself as thing or “kind
of quid.” In phenomenological terms, the non-reduction of the self to the
mode of being of the thing, always “subsistent” (vorhanden) and “available”
(zuhanden), sanctions a Dasein or a way of being human which there again
does not have to be inasmuch as “the being of the being is not itself a being.”46
But in Erigena the theologian, contrary to Heidegger the phenomenologist,
man does not achieve by himself some sort of authenticity to conquer this
58 God
non-being-ness of his own humanity. On the contrary, he has received it

from God alone, the unique Being-there capable of not considering himself
as quid, as well as of receiving the totality of beings and of conferring the
same power to humanity. “Negative anthropology” here becomes the neces-
sary equivalent of “negative theology.” God progressively travels the distance
which separates him from humanity in order now to hold him in proximity
as that which he has forged in his image. The horizontal phenomenology of
the existentials (Heidegger) is now enriched in an exclusively Christian per-
spective (Maximus and Erigena) of a vertical theology of the imago Dei that
legitimates access to humanity and confers upon it its proper status.47
The work of the negative (the apophatic) is accomplished through the
observation of a necessary proximity of the divine capable of abolishing
distance. Humanity, as the image of God, understood precisely as the impos-
sibility of knowing oneself, thus partakes of the sharing without measure
that is God’s learned ignorance. John Scotus Erigena “negates the ‘distance’
between God and primordial humanity, a distance filled by the theophanic
process,” emphasizes Francis Bertin (thus marking the difference with Denys),
“all the way until the divine essence theophanically descends into the ratio-
nal and intellectual creature and causes him to merit the name of ‘God’ by
derivation.”48 Therefore God now somehow exits from the inner reaches of
his Essence and is given to visibility no longer negatively in the philosophi-
cal field of the “apophatic” (and of the meta-ontological), but positively in
the scriptural logos of the “apophantic” which manifests him while at the
same time making a setting for it: “It is not only the divine essence [non enim
essentia divina] which connotes the word God,” as we have already empha-
sized following Erigena, “but also this mode [sed modus ille] under which
God is shown [ostendit] to the intellectual and rational creature . . . which is
frequently called God as well by Holy Scripture [Deus saepe a sacra Scriptura
vocitatur].”49
The Apophantic or the Setting of Logos
Manifestation thus legitimately abides with the logos, in phenomenology (the

manifest) as in theology (the theophany), deploying a type of discourse which
is made the setting [écrin] without being made a screen [écran]. The exiting
from being by the nihilation of eminence and the struggle against every form
of reification of the divine leads Erigena, like Aristotle before him and Hei-
degger after him, toward a new mode, properly called the “apophantic” that
is revelatory of the thing itself (apo-phaines-thai): “Logos as speech really
means dêloun, to make manifest ‘what is being talked about’ in speech. Aris-
totle explicates this function of speech more precisely as apophainesthai [to
be manifested].”50 The Dionysian apophatic (that which lies beyond speech
(apo-phanein) is found in fact radically modified and transformed by the
God Phenomenon 59
Erigenian apophantic (the crossing of the manifest [apo-phainesthai]). One is

not allowed to remain either taking refuge in an apophaticism or on the quest
for a meta-ontology, at least insofar as John Scotus Erigena is taken into
consideration and not Denys the Areopagite alone. For Erigena, the act of
speech, if it truly traces an image like the sculptor who “strips” the block of
marble in order to liberate the form (Denys),51 nevertheless ought to remain
“like a kind of vestment” (veluti quibusdam vestimentis) which “reveals” or
“manifests” (manifestare) a body already constituted all the while hiding
it.52 Otherwise said, whereas the Dionysian model of the “opening” of the
sculpture liberates a figure of God only by abstracting from that which he
is not, the Erigenian paradigm of “unveiling” by clothing over shows on the
contrary that which it leaves to see of itself only by hiding it. Whereas for
one nothing is shown except precisely that there is nothing to show (the Dio-
nysian stripping), the other on the contrary shows that everything remains to
be shown, or rather to be manifested, since the One who is manifest may very
well wish to remove the veils himself (the Erigenian unveiling). The destruc-
tion of categories, in the Heideggerian sense of the term, will be in this sense
all the more radical in Erigena as it progressively assists the manifestation of
a phenomenon—God—which possesses no other requirement, by way of the
paradigm of all phenomenality, than to “show starting from itself that which
is shown such that it is shown starting from itself.”53
The Destruction of the Categories

The work of the apophantic as “manifestation through the discourse about
that which it speaks” ought therefore to pass first through the “task of a
destruction [Desktruktion] of the history of ontology.”54 “To destroy” overly
used categories or rather to “deconstruct” or “dis-obstruct”—but not to
“annihilate” them: such is precisely, if also paradoxically, the task fixed for
Erigena from the very beginning of his Periphyseon (book 1).55 (a) “Without
being”; (b) “without relation”; (c) even “without love,” the Irishman radical-
izes the Dionysian reduction for which nothing remains of God outside of
his negation—except, in an original fashion in Erigena, the “veridical and
metaphorical” meaning of his proper manifestations in his auto-affirmation:
“If the negation proves to be truly in God [si vera est negatio in divinis rebus],
then the affirmation proves truly not to remain in Him, but it proves to be
only metaphorical [non autem ver sed metaphorica affirmatio].”56
God “without” Being. (a) “Without being”: here we return to the debate
with Thomas Aquinas (chap. 1). God is here considered “without being” not
simply insofar as he “is not a thing” (supra), but for the reason that “the
divine nature is not ousia because it is more than ousia [non est igitur ousia,
quia plus est quam ousia].”57 The question no longer concerns the status
of ousia—substance as “being” or “act of being” (see the debate between
60 God
Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas)—but is a matter instead of a surpassing of

substance itself in the meta-ontology of a discourse which does not overflow
the categories as much as it destroys them, or better, deconstructs them. Con-
tra Augustine for whom no category is predicable to God in the sense proper
to God except that of essence or substance ([see chap. 1], De Trinitate, V, II,
3), Erigena maintains the inverse position, namely that no mode of “subsis-
tence” could be legitimately predicated of God, if the term “being”—as I have
indicated already—is understood as a certain determined mode of the divine
in the same way as the collection of beings: “When we predicate Being of him
[ideo praedicantes ipsius esse], we do not want to say that God ought to be
himself Being [non dicimus ipsum esse]: because being proceeds from God,
but God in himself is not Being [ex ipso enim esse, sed non ipsum esse].”58
God “without” Relation. (b) “Without relation”: definitively surpassing the

question of the link between relation and substance (chap. 1), God is thought
here in Erigena in an even more radical manner than in Denys. Everything
happens, in fact, as if, as René Roques has said, Erigena “denied relation to
God . . . , which Denys had not expressly done even if the logic of apophasis
ought to have led him there.”59 Without necessarily exiting from the tension
of metaphysics and theology or wrongly believing in the end of a dialogue
with Hellenism (chap. 1), the author of the Periphyseon is however plagued
by some limitations. Contra Augustine, according to whom “relation” (ad
aliquid) of the Father and Son does not constitute an accident in God but
rather designates what is proper to God [De Trinitate, V, V, 6], Erigena holds
to the contrary an impossible adaptation of it in the field of Trinitarian theol-
ogy. He knows the cost of such a move, but it remains here the condition sine
qua non of his double discourse, which is all the more apophatic as it is apo-
phantic, that is to say all the more a “negator” of the ordinary mode of beings
as it is a “revelator” of the proper way that God gives himself to humanity:
“If this category of connection or relation [relatio sive habitudo] is predicable
in the proper sense to God [proprie de Deo], then almost all of our preced-
ing reasoning would be obsolete [omnis ferme praedicta nostra ratiocinatio
evacuabitur]. I have previously asserted as a general rule that nothing can be
formulated or conceived in the proper sense concerning God [nihil proprie de
Deo aut dici aut intelligi posse]. And above all the category of relation [prae-
sertim categoria relationis] will no longer be counted among the ten kinds of
categories, if it becomes predicable in the proper sense to God . . . It would
be necessary for us to understand therefore that this category of relation, like
the other categories, is also only predicable of God in a metaphorical sense
[translative de Deo praedicare].”60
God “without” Love. (c) “Without love”: in a drastic way, God is finally
without agapê, at least from the point of view of eros. The acting out and the
lived suffering of love (amor) are in fact for Erigena categories that are all
God Phenomenon 61
the more appropriate to becoming as they are unable to designate in them-

selves the stillness of the Non-Being that is God: “These two categories are
therefore without a doubt predicable of Him (God) only in a metaphorical
(translative) sense.”61 What are the verbs “to love” and “to be loved” but
respectively the active and passive reception of a certain movement? The con-
clusion, which places love outside of the divine realm, imposes itself: “It will
necessarily follow that everything that I have conceded in the case of acting
and suffering, I ought also to concede in the case of other active and passive
verbs, whatever category of verb to which they pertain. That is, God neither
loves nor is loved, he neither moves nor is moved, and a thousand analogous
examples [neque Deus amare, neque amari, neque movere, neque moveri,
similiaque mille].”62
It goes without saying that the God “without being,” “without relation,”
and “without love” is not a God who neither is nor has being, relation, or love:
no more than God “is not” (tout court) in the God without Being of Jean-Luc
Marion, but “is only because he gives.” Further still, God neither lives nor
is nourished by being, relation, and love in John Scotus Erigena—who risks
the inverse of making “without” only the negation of that which yet belongs
appropriately to God.63 The danger of the characteristics that we qualify as
“categorical” according to the very precise note of Heidegger, is that “they
belong to beings whose kind of being is unlike Dasein,” and “all have the
same kind of being—that of being objectively present (vorhanden)—as things
occurring ‘within’ the world.”64 Otherwise said, the “without” of being, rela-
tion, and love indicates less here the privation of a quality inherent to God,
as it does the deconstruction of all categorical predication to its subject, of
which the closure in this type of predicative logos necessarily entangles and
restricts without ever being able to contain it. In the same way that the “phe-
nomenological reduction” requires a kind of philosophical ascesis in order
to suspend the categorical and to reach the existential, there is also a radi-
calization in the “putting between parentheses” of all the divine categories
that appears to be necessary in order for negative theology to exhibit that
which is manifest at the heart of every manifestation in a fashion that is more
demonstrative (phainesthai) than predicative (categorein): “The validity of
the categories becomes entirely void when it comes to theology,” Erigena
patently emphasizes, “[ad theologiam pervenitur . . . , categoriarum virtus
omnino extinguitur]; and I in nowise designate by the word nothingness
[nihilo] this negation which denies that God is some existing being [nega-
tionem qua negatur Deus esse quid eorum quae sunt], but rather that which
negates God and the creature simultaneously [sed illam quae negat Deum et
creaturam].”65
Therefore God comes to us precisely because we are no longer on our own
able to go to him—because of the inadequacy of our language as well as the
limits of our capacity to receive him. This coming, like phenomenological
consciousness, precisely makes of him first, and then of us, an act and no
62 God
longer a thing.66 His proper mode of existing will in fact for him not be of
being or subsisting, but of going and coming, in the sense of the indefatigable
way of the One who travels theophanically, and no longer only negatively or
superlatively, the distance which separates him from humanity. Y aller (“To
go there”)–that is to say in French as for the Erigenian theophanic God, not
only “to come and see [venir pour voir]” (to take a look [y jeter un oeil]),
but even “to be fully involved in this coming [s’engager pleinement dans ce
venir]” (speeding along while running [foncer en courant]) to the degree that
He is also known in this coming of man. Not only (a) as “the One who sees,”
he comes also to us (b) as “the One who runs.”
The One Who Sees and the One Who Runs

Supporting Etymology. The characteristic that distinguishes Erigenian “apo-
phantic discourse” from the simple Dionysian “apophatic way” is that it
manifests (apophainesthai) that which alone remains beyond speech (apo-
phansis). It is therefore understood as a type of logos that escapes from
categorical norms, not only in order to transcend them but also in order to
show that which is being spoken about (phenomenology and theophany).
We are compelled then to recognize that God first communicates himself to
humanity by his modes of manifestation—a speech that is not uniquely tied
to the power of words.
A surprising text in Erigena distinguishes God in terms of celerity or rather
haste [l’empressement]. For Erigena God is all the more anxious to join man
by showing him that he is not left closed or isolated in a distance from the
One about whom nothing can be said—except, precisely, that he is not able
to be spoken about. The Greek etymology once again discloses something
significant much like the second meaning of theophany drawn from the verb
phainô (supra). Here we are concerned with God—ô theos: “The Greeks
have drawn an etymology from the name God [theos] according to which the
name derives from the verb theôrô [aut a verbo quod est theôrô derivatur],
that is to say, ‘I see’ [hoc est video], or even that it derives from the verb theô
[aut ex verbo theô], that is to say, ‘I run’ [hoc est curro], or yet again—and
this is the more likely because their meanings converge on a single and same
meaning—it could be rightly argued that this one word derives from two
verbs.”67
God as the One Who Sees. (a) God as “the one who sees” (theôrô)—an ety-
mology inherited from Denys, Basil, and Gregory of Nyssa, but which here
receives its most important theological treatment before Nicholas of Cusa.
In good negative theological manner, God sees first, and he sees precisely
because he does not see, or rather because there is nothing to see except
Himself in whom everything “visible” always remains contained. Otherwise
said, it matters little to Erigena that God is able to see this or that among the
God Phenomenon 63
number of created beings if it is the case that the mode by which he sees is
nothing other than Himself as he carries within the collection of possibilities
of the visible—that is, the totality of phenomena, the visible as well as the
invisible yet to be seen: “Where theos comes from the verb theôrô, it is inter-
preted as signifying the One who sees [videns interpretatur] because God sees
in himself everything that exists [ipse enim omnia quae sunt in seipso videt],
where he contemplates nothing outside of himself [dum nihil extra seipsum
aspiciat] because nothing subsists outside of God [quia nihil extra seipsum
est].”68
Only the passage from the second to the third division of Nature—from
the primordial causes of all existing things containing the Word (the Cre-
ated creator) to the manifestation of the collection of beings including man
(the Created non-creator)—renders intelligible the conception of the reserve
of possibles of phenomenality that God carries quasi-maternally in himself
without having brought them all forth into the light.69 With the majority of
the entire creation still awaiting its birth, the Word holds hidden in itself the
totality of existing beings in “the most secret recesses of nature [ex secretis
naturae],” which are called to come out in order to bear forth, now in the
mode of visibility, that which, for the time, remains obscure in the realm of
invisibility or the non-manifest. The invisible phenomena contained in God
(as in Nature as well) progressively ascend toward their own visibility before
the One who sees (videns), who is thereby phenomenologically manifest
(phainesthai) or rendered visible: “Every day God calls men from the hidden
recesses of nature [ex secretis naturae sinibus vocat] in which they are judged
as ‘non-being’ in order to appear in a visible mode [ut appareant visibiliter]
in form and matter and through all the other properties by which the hidden
existing beings are able to make their appearance [in quibus occulta apparere
possunt].”70
God, understood as “the One who sees” (theôrô), has nothing to do
with a voyeuristic onlooker whose eye oppresses the collection of creatures
embarrassed by their very visibility because they are held under such a sur-
veillance. On the contrary, it is precisely in order to remove vision from such
an oppressive, tawdry Stare that the visible, that is, the creature, unites—or
more precisely constitutes “a single and same reality [unum et idipsum]”—
with the Invisible, that is, God himself. This is the point where a number of
interpreters falsely read some kind of pantheism into Erigena. Yet it is more
fitting to understand the inverse, especially here, which means substituting
the model of an auto-manifestation about which the terms of “auto-creation”
say nothing except that, for God himself and in himself, the act of creation
is never anything other than a self-showing: “Therefore we ought to under-
stand that God and the creature do not constitute two distinct realities [non
duo a seipsis distantia], but constitute a single and same reality [sed unum
et id ipsum (sic)]. Because it is by a mutual concurrence that the creature
subsists in God and that God is created [se faciens] under an extraordinary
64 God
and inexpressible mode in the creature, manifesting Himself there [seipsum

manifestans].”71
A “pantheistic conception of theophany renders theophany just as incon-
ceivable as an abstract apophaticism.”72 Erigena himself already makes this
clear: according to him, the belonging of all creatures “to a single and same
thing” which is God (unum et id ipsum) does not signify that the creatures
are themselves God or the Creator. The totality of God as essence (a monad
ological conception inserting all creatures into God) and the essence of God
as totality (a pantheistic conception which leaves nothing subsisting at all,
neither of the Creator nor of the creature) are hardly confused here. The
double rapport of participation and expression in the relation of beings to
God justifies the auto-manifestation of the Creator in his creature, but it does
not justify in any way their pure substantial identity. There would have been
nothing to say about participation or expression if God had been identified
stricto sensu with the world: “The Divine Nature is created [creatur] in the
sense that no other essence than it exists because it is itself the Essence of
all existing beings . . . , in the same way that everything that is said to exist
does not exist in itself, but exists only by participation [participatione] in the
sole truly existing Nature . . . It is because this divine Nature which in itself
is invisible, becomes visible [apparet] in everything that exists, that it is not
incongruous to say that it is created in everything that exists [non incongrue
dicitur facta].”73
It is therefore only by extension and “in an extraordinary mode” (mirabili
modo) that it can be said of this Nature (God) that it “creates everything that
exists” (omnia creat) and “is nevertheless created in all the existing beings
which proceed from it” (et ab ullo creari in omnibus).74 Thus to be created,
as far as God is concerned, means “to be manifested in something [in aliquo]”
and this manifestation is the substantial foundation of everything that exists
more than it is some facile refuge in a transcendence as unsayable as it is
remote. “When the divine Nature is said to create itself [seipsam creare], it
should be understood in no other way than that it creates the nature of exist-
ing beings, because the auto-creation of the divine Nature [ipsius namque
creatio], that is, its manifestation in something [hoc est in aliquo manifesta-
tio], is tantamount to the act of the creation of all existing beings.”75
“The One who sees,” the seeing or self-manifesting God (theos drawn
from theôrô) is therefore paradoxically “the one who works,” that is the
creating or self-becoming God: “In God, seeing and working do not consti-
tute distinct properties,” emphasizes Erigena, “but his vision coincides with
his operation [sed ipsius visio ipsius est operatio]. God sees in his operations
and operates in his seeing [videt enim operando, et videndo operatur].”76 For
God, to see is therefore to be seen in creatures and to create is to be created
or manifested by them. To speak in Bergsonian terms, the “being made” of
a God who works interiorly and is made visible in his creatures is opposed
to and distinguished from the “ready-made” of external subsisting beings.77
God Phenomenon 65
With Erigena, a new and perhaps first mode of being of a monadology is born
into the history of philosophy: God as “the One who sees” does not first see
things external to him, but sees himself as in a mirror, carrying in Himself all
existing beings in their primordial causes.78 Far from being a distant spectacle
to which the Dionysian negative theology leads (Eminence, Super-essentiality,
etc.) and not at all like the great mass of all the possibles waiting to be mani-
fested (passage of primordial causes to existing beings), the divine seeing is so
close to the creature that it is identified in reality with it only in order better
to signify and to show how it carries the creature within itself. The schema
is here theophanic (and Erigenian) and hardly demiurgic and Platonic. God
does not see (the primordial causes or exemplary ideas) in order to create or
then to produce existing beings (created beings subject to space and time).
But he creates as soon as he sees the primordial causes and sees as soon as he
creates existing beings. God is no longer content “to say that this is” as in an
Old Testament conception of the word (Gen. 1:3–31) but “sees” and is “made
seen” in the New Testament vision of the auto-manifestation of God: “Who-
ever has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn. 14:9). What God sees is therefore
identical to what God creates since in creating and in becoming incarnate the
Word makes himself seen in his creatures as unique exemplary things: “The-
ology teaches that the existing beings that God has seen within himself before
they were created are not distinct from the existing beings that God has then
created in themselves, but these are the same existing beings [sed eadem] who
have been both seen and created from all eternity; their vision and creation
have taken place in God [in Deo], since nothing is able to take place outside
of God [extra Deum].”79
One could object that to define God as “the One who sees” (theôrô), even
when for him to see would be to see Himself in seeing the collection of beings
in him by whom he is auto-manifested, is still to think theophany in the mode
of seeing that is so properly human that it would be for God like being struck
by blindness. Erigena would thus lose in his concept of theophany precisely
what the Areopagite contributes in his negative theology. The contributions
of Dionysian apophaticism to Erigenian theophany result in the refusal to
make the act of seeing—since it pertains properly to God as to be capable of
creating through auto-manifestation—the simple aim of a subject either suf-
fering the imperfection of blindness or removed from the visibility of certain
beings. God is called “all-seeing” because of the omnipresence of his seeing,
such that he even creates through seeing, and is, in this sense, “more than
seeing” (plusquam videns), since his seeing is reduced neither to the possible
blindness of a subject, nor to the eventual invisibility of an object: “It is also
called God [theos] but it is not properly speaking God at all [in the sense of ‘I
see’ (theôrô)]: because the vision is opposed to blindness and to the one who
sees is opposed the one who does not see; God will be therefore upertheos
[sic]—more than seeing [plus quam videns]—if one interprets theos as the
One who sees.”80
66 God
Nevertheless, make no mistake: I have already emphasized that “all the

uper- superlatives to which Denys makes recourse” ought to be understood
in a negative manner within Erigena’s thought, since what is apparently affir-
mative in the very formulation (super or plus quam) should be understood
as negative in meaning and in reality.81 The principle of the nihilation of emi-
nence thus makes God, as “the One who sees,” not a pure seeing withdrawn
into the invisibility of an unseen, but an arch-Visible beyond every modality
of ordinary seeing—in particular of that which would accidentally make him
unable to see. Therefore, God as “more than seeing” (plus quam videns) does
not indicate in Erigena that God does not see or takes refuge alone in the
bottomless mystery of his luminous obscurity (exit from the via affirmationis
and the via negationis by the via eminentiae); but first and only that his see-
ing is such that it sees all, and even “more” (than all), since the all that he
sees is Himself who contains all things and manifests them (exit from the via
affirmationis and the via negationis by what can be called via theophaniae).
The “seeing” of God in his auto-manifestation and in his auto-creation by
the creature, each being only the inverse of the other, therefore holds back
nothing for itself in some kind of self-invisibility. In order that the apophan-
tic logos manifests and realizes the theophanic movement that it carries, the
spectral dimension of seeing abides with the Word as it crosses the ford that
separates it from the visible, which is insurmountable for man and crossed
by God alone. “The One who sees” is thus the same as “the One who runs
[court]”—or better who “runs through [par-court]” the distance that sepa-
rates all Seeing from the visible according to the ordinary scheme of visibility:
“But when theos is drawn from the verb theô, it is rightly interpreted as signi-
fying the One who runs [currens recte intelligitur]. Because God runs across
everything that exists and is never impeded, he fills all in his course, conform-
ing to this verse of Scripture: ‘his word runs with haste’ (Ps. 147:15).”82
God as the One Who Runs. (b) “Courir” [to run]—from the verb theô (I
run), the second etymological root of the word God (theos)—designates in
reality the proper way to describe God as creator in Erigena. The divine Verb
“runs” in his creation in the sense that he alone effects the distance which
separates him from creatures and unfurls himself in them, so that nothing
may exist outside of him except sin: “The Word is unfurled from one end
of the world to the other, and he runs with haste across all existing beings
[et voliciter currit per omnia], that is to say that the Word creates them all
instantaneously, and that the Word becomes all in all. And then even as the
Word continues to subsist in himself . . . , he is unfurled across all existing
beings and this extension itself is constitutive of all things.”83
The “unfurling” or “extension” of the Word in his creatures is such that
it assumes precisely as its own the role of logos apophantikos as we found
above, that is, of the Word who manifests what comes to him from another
and which is reduced neither to apophatic speech (saying nothing except
God Phenomenon 67
that there is nothing to say) nor to metaphysical judgment (massively oppos-

ing “the things which are” to “those which are not”). “Running” (currens)
even more than “Seeing” (videns), the Word not only works to bring existing
beings from the status of “primordial causes” to that of “beings manifest by
their generation in time and space” (passage from the second to the third
division),84 but he makes them subsist and maintains existing beings in their
creation as a word continually uttered from the Father (verbum Patris): “ ‘His
word runs with swiftness’ (Ps. 147:15)—under the term of Word [sermo] the
prophet has designated the Word of the Father [verbum Patris], who runs
with swiftness through all existing beings in order that they may exist [quod
velociter currit per omnia ut omnia sint], because it is the multiple and infinite
course of the Word through all existing beings which makes them subsist.”85
The reason for a pretended pantheism in Erigena has thus sometimes been
(wrongly) sought in his conception of the Trinity insufficiently differentiated
from the creation. Even though such a judgment would not be meaningless
with regard to the prevalence of the “creative Trinity” in Bonaventure, for
example,86 it nevertheless remains no less incomplete as it is one-sided here
since the scheme of running speaks precisely about the auto-subsistence of
the Word in his creatures as the unique speech of the Father. No more than
that the unveiling of beings by the Father in the Son (creation) is opposed
to the manifestation of the Father in the Son (incarnation), is God’s “act of
running” in maintaining the subsistence of creatures opposed to his “act of
seeing” which brings them to light: “In God the act of running through every-
thing that exists is no different from his act of seeing everything that exists,
but everything that exists is produced concurrently by his running and by his
vision [sed sicut videndo, ita et currendo fiunt omnia].”87
In the dialogue of the Periphyseon, the Alumnus (student) rightly objects
to the Nutritor (teacher): But where does this Word run who “is unfurled
from one end of the world to the other” in order that he subsist through
all subsistent beings? “I do not understand very well,” he says, “where the
One who resides everywhere could be moved, apart from whom everything
would cease to exist and outside of whom nothing subsists.” Matching the
pertinence of this question, the response is only more clear and incisive: “I
have mentioned that God does not move outside of himself [non extra se],
but rather starting from himself, within himself and toward himself [sed a
seipso, in seipso, ad seipsum].”88 If God “runs” after his creatures—in the
double implication of the word as haste and intentional aim—it is first “in
himself” that he runs in order to “cause to run” the creatures who are in him.
The “running in God” is also the path taken by beings in him in view of their
own manifestation: “If God is therefore called the One who runs [currens
dicitur], it is not because God—who always remains at rest in himself in an
immutable way, who fills everything that exists—could run outside of him-
self, but because he causes everything that exists [sed qui amnia currere facit]
to run from a state of nonexistence to that of existence.”89
68 God
The power of such a monadology as Erigena’s, since everything except sin

happens and is produced first only in God, appears with even more force in
this instance of the race. The swiftness of the One who runs has in fact no
other end than of crossing the impassable distance that the prism of vision
always imposes—in the irreducible gap between the One who sees and the
very one who is seen. For God, to run signifies to cross himself and “to join
the two ends” in himself of a course that is always accomplished beforehand
by remaining contained in itself. Man, however, makes the inverse choice of
“intentionally leaving the race” through sin. The theophanic vision is clearly
announced here in the Word as logos apophantikos, the revealing Speech in
whom every creature finds its course and tends toward its own manifestation.
The Word “causes to run [currere facit] every existing being from a state
of nonexistence to that of existence” in order to give them the capacity to
move to a state of visibility which they do not on their own possess (passage
from the second to the third division of Nature). God (theos) “more than
runs [plusquam currens]”—a notion that differs from slowness to no greater
degree than the God who “more than sees” is opposed to blindness.90 In this
way, room opens for a true manifestation of God by which the truth of divine
movement is no longer uniquely given by his Essence in a Neoplatonic or
Dionysian apophaticism, but through his Appearance (apparitio) in a scrip-
tural and Erigenian theophany.
The Theophanic, or the God Phenomenon
Without doubt, one could define the general trend of all of Latin theology
from Erigena to Marcilio Ficino as a perpetual attempt to “vanquish dissimi-
larity” by means of a certain deviation from Denys. Thus Thomas Aquinas
vanquishes dissimilarity “by analogy,” Ficino “by love,” and Jean Scotus
Erigena “by theophany.”91 God is no longer only manifest here in the sense
that he manifests himself in the Word of the Father as his apophantic dis-
course (supra), but as he attests and witnesses to himself in the present of his
own “appearance” (apparitio Dei). It is fitting, since the Greeks, to call this
appearance a “theophany” (theophania), which is also written in the Latin
manuscripts of Erigena as the Hellenic “theoyophania.”92 The “reduction”
or “putting in parentheses” of every declaration of the quid of God, which
would always qualify Augustinian discourse (chap. 1), in Erigena opens onto
a true “phenomenology of the inapparent” which has absolutely no reason to
be envious of the Heideggerian determination of the phenomenon.93
Theophany and Anthropophany

Non Apparentis Apparitio. To speak of the “phenomenology of the inappar-
ent” in Heidegger is to announce that “the possibility even exists that they
God Phenomenon 69
can show themselves as they are not in themselves”; and “precisely because
phenomena are initially and for the most part not given phenomenology is
needed.”94 Otherwise said, for phenomenology as for theology, neither the
phenomenon nor God pertain to the crude concept of the phenomenon
where being shown suffices in order to be. The “word God” for example
is quite capable of “connoting the divine essence” (essentia divina dicitur)
as Erigena emphasized, without yet indicating “this mode under which it is
shown” (modus ille quo se ostendit): “theophany” is an “appearance of God”
(theophania, hoc est apparitio Dei).95 Erigena, much like Heidegger after him,
nicely traces therefore the frontier between “what appears” (quid) and “the
thing as it appears,” that is to say its “mode” of appearing: modus or quo-
modo. To see “the Lord seated” (Is. 6:1), the prophet Isaiah does not first see
the Lord as he is, but only as he shows himself under the modality of sitting.
The seat of God, as his most appropriate modality according to scripture, is
probably more important than his definition by essence from the point of
view of metaphysics. His kinestheses or “movements of his appearance” give
more being to him than his essence as a determination of his quiddity. Thus
God, for Erigena, is discovered to be defined in an exemplary way, almost
phenomenologically, as “the appearance of what is non- apparent”— non
apparentis apparitio: “Everything that can be conceived by the intelli-
gence or perceived by the senses is nothing other than the appearance of
the one who is non-apparent [nihil aliud est nisi non apparentis appari-
tio], the manifestation of the one who is hidden [occulti manifestatio] . . . ,
the corporealization of the incorporeal . . . , the visibility of the invisible,
the localization of the one who is without a place, the temporalization of
the non-temporal, the finitization of the infinite, the circumscription of the
uncircumscribable.”96
The critical problem of Erigenian theophany, like Heideggerian phenom-
enology, concerns the difficulty of not separating the apparent (apparens)
from its appearance (apparitio). Or, to say it another way, and in phenom-
enological terms, it concerns not reducing the divine appearance in its
“automanifestation” (Offenbarung) either to a simple “illusion” (Schein)
or to an “appearance” which only shows what it is not (Erscheinung). Not
as “semblance” or as “appearance” is it able to show something of the
revelation of God as he is in himself, but only as both show God only as
not showing himself, as not truly received by man, although man alone is
capable of welcoming him and of himself participating in his own forma-
tion in God—today in his state of wandering as tomorrow in the fatherland:
“Every theophany [omnis theophania] . . . , both in the present life where it
begins to be re-formed inchoately in men who are becoming worthy of it,
as well as in the future life in men who will obtain the perfection of divine
beatitude, is therefore produced not outside of them [non extra se] but in
them [sed in se], simultaneously by God and by themselves [et ex Deo et ex
seipsis].”97
70 God
Theophanic Man. Against a number of normally Greek mystics who hold to

a radical passivity and the subjection of the believer to the weight of the glory
of God (kabôd), Erigena professes that men possess in themselves the capac-
ity to phenomenalize in themselves (in se), through themselves (ex seipsis) and
starting from Him (ex Deo), a figure of the divine that is never given outside
of such a human reserve—requiring such a mode of constitution in order to
be able precisely to be phenomenalized. The absorption of the subject (man)
in the object (God) kills the act of reception as it annihilates the substantial-
ity of both. The “appearance of the one who does not appear” (apparitio
non apparentis apparitio) thus progressively rises toward the appearance by
searching for a place to appear in man or in any rational creature. Angels and
human souls are like “household receivers” for theophanies (F. Bertin); they
“are” even “theophanies” themselves (thephaniae sunt). Phenomenologically
speaking, they manifest that God is never anything other than the One who
manifests himself in such theophanies, and therefore uniquely through them
and not immediately in himself. Erigena asks, therefore, in his commentary
on the verse “No one has ever seen God” (Jn. 1:18) from the prologue of
John’s Gospel: “What do the souls of holy men and the intelligences of holy
angels see when they see God, if they do not see God himself [si ipsum Deum]
whom they are allegedly seeing? What will they see, since Ambrose and Denys
the Areopagite both very clearly and without hesitation affirm that God, the
supreme Trinity, has never appeared in himself to anyone [nulli per seipsam
umquam apparuisse], and does not appear today, nor will he ever appear?
God will appear by means of his theophanies [apparebit in theophanis suis],
that is, in his divine appearances in which he will appear according to the
degree of purity and virtue in each one. But the theophanies are all visible
or invisible creatures [theophaniae autem sunt omnes creaturae visibiles et
invisibiles] by which and in which God has often appeared, appears and will
appear.”98
In Erigena theophany is therefore not a simple means of passing over
to God, as if the mirror is a “prism” that one moves through [du miroir
comme prisme à dépasser]. It designates the very structure of God (imma-
nent Trinity)—at least insofar as it is given to man (economic Trinity). God
is nothing for us outside of his divine manifestation (theophania), for man
and the angels.99 Therefore God gives himself “theophanically” provided that
man is at the same time “anthropophanic.” Or, said otherwise and in a new
way, following our phenomenological theme according to which all truth
(alêtheia) is also “the simple sense perception of something [aistheisis],”100
man, in order to receive theophanies, and possessing within the structure of
encounter or the capacity for reception, consecrates himself as a theophany
manifesting nothing but himself as “anthropophany.” Desiring to manifest
God as phenomenon, man exhibits himself as phenomenon insofar as he
is the condition of the possibility of all phenomenality, “in whom all crea-
tures have been constituted [in ipsa omnis creatura constituta est], and shows
God Phenomenon 71
himself first as such.”101 Anthropophanic man, as the uniting point [trait

d’union] between the intelligible and sensible worlds, and in his capacity
to manifest God, ought thus to be considered as a “third world” (tertius
mundus), precisely because he possesses, along with the divine, this unique
phenomenological capacity to constitute a world—the very same as God in
his own appearing: “The third world [tertius mundus], as a middle term,
enacts in itself the junction of the superior world of spiritual realities and of
the inferior world of corporeal realities, making them one. This third world is
only discovered in man [et in homine solo intelligitur], in whom all creation
is organized into unity [in quo omnis creatura adunatur].”102
The Operation of a Synthesis. The famous Erigenian theme of man as “medi-

ating and unifying agent of all creatures [medietas atque adunatio omnium
creaturarum], since there exists no creature that one could consider as sub-
sistent apart from man” ought thus to be understood not from a dialectical
point of view (union of contraries), but first phenomenologically and anthro-
pophanically (the manifestation of God in man).103 “Man is the crucible of
all creatures [creaturarum omnium officina] since all creatures subsist in him
in a synthetic mode [quoniam in ipso universalis creatura continetur].”104
Man, as the enactment of synthesis, supports and displays the manifesta-
tion of God himself in creatures. Because man alone among all the creatures
somehow lives in this state of “remaining” (F. Bertin) by his capacity to wel-
come the totality of created things, God intends that he would be the one
in whom creatures would also be manifested. The cooperation of the divine
and human is thus such that in the act of auto-manifestation of God in his
creatures the theophany of one never subsists apart from the anthropophany
of the other.105 At the end of the road, anthropophanic man, traversed by the
theophanic God, will leave nothing to appear in celestial beatitude except the
One who is the Manifestation himself (apparitio)—phenomenologically from
whom everything appears and toward whom every appearance is directed.
In this way the Periphyseon closes, definitively marked with the seal of phe-
nomenality, even to God’s complete opening or appearing: “Nothing appears
except God alone [ita ut in nullo appareat nisi solus Deus], as in the air so
pure that nothing flows except the light of the sun [quemadmodum in aëre
purissimo nihil arridet nisi sola lux].”106
Beatitude as Theophany in Act

But does the “self manifestation,” actualized absolutely in celestial beatitude,
lead then to the pure and simple suppression of all theophany, that is to
say, of all phenomenality? Said otherwise, does Erigenian phenomenality not
exhaust itself in its phenomenalization since the theophanic appearance is
never anything but a stage toward the vision God “as he is” (Jn. 3:2) and
“face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12)?
72 God
Theophanies of Theophanies. Erigena remains substantially phenomenologi-

cal even to the ultimate manifestation of the One who is manifestation itself.
Even as the phenomenological concept of the phenomenon is never manifest
outside of the Being which gives being,107 so also there is no theophany in
Erigena apart from its sensible or intelligible manifestation. Nor is there any
theophany apart from the appearance of something that appears—even up to
and including the final encounter: “It is therefore by means of the body and
in the body that God will be seen [per corpora ergo in corporibus videbitur],
and not through Himself [non per seipsum]. In a parallel way, it is by means
of the intellect and in the intellect, by means of reason and in reason, and not
through itself [non per seipsam], that the divine essence will become visible
[divina essentia apparebit].”108
The Word who alone will transgress his proper phenomenality in order
to contemplate himself in his nature and creatures in him. Man, on the
contrary— saints and blessed included— will never see God but through
theophanies, even some “theophanies of theophanies” (theophaniarum
theophaniae) not reducible to some divine being supposedly overtaking or
suppressing them. The incompressibility of the theophanic prism makes of
the theophanic God a God who has another mode of being than the one
appropriate to his manifestations—at least for man: “God will impart and
fix a degree of beatitude to each of these natures as is fitting with their proper
mode of analogy . . . If we use such language, this does not mean that any
creature, except for the humanity of the Word [praeter Verbi humanitatem],
could be elevated beyond all theophany . . . This means only that the elect will
succeed in acquiring such transcendent theophanies . . . that they will obtain
a contemplation of God that is almost direct [proxima Deo contemplatione
intelligantur], and which will constitute in some way some theophanies of
theophanies [ac veluti theophaniarum theophaniae].”109 The act of theoph-
any in Erigena, at least for man, is not accomplished in an invisibility all the
more ineffable as it is forgotten in the vertigo of its mystifying cloud that is
its own visibility (Denys). God does not require the invisible in some Neo-
platonic way, but on the contrary descends into visibility itself—up to and
including the encounter of transfigured flesh.
The Call to the Visible. A rereading of Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans is
sufficiently convincing: “God calls the things which are not as if they are”
(Rom. 4:17). According to Erigena, this kind of “call” is not simply another
denomination made in order to say what God is. Rather, it introduces the
creatures into a structure of the call until, like God himself, they respond
to their ultimate vocation of emerging into the visible. The hidden mystery
is always waiting to be unveiled like the sea, which ever only withdraws to
uncover each time a new shore.110 Man, held deep within the “secret folds
of nature” (ex secretis naturae), is sought by the theophanic God of Erig
ena, who conquers man by the seductive “call” of his voice in order that
God Phenomenon 73
he may be raised as his most perfect “respondent.” The act of “hearing”

certainly defines Judaism (“Hear O Israel,” Deut. 6:4), but is also, in Chris-
tianity, folded into the service of “seeing” (“he who has seen me has seen the
Father,” Jn. 14:9) and of “touching” (“the Word of life whom our hands have
touched,” 1 Jn. 1:1). Here we climb back up to the basic guiding question of
this work. There is no Word on one side and flesh on the other—like a sort
of false opposition between the first and second Testament. On the contrary,
the Word “was made flesh in order that flesh might become word,” as Mark
the Ascetic said.111 The structure of the call according to Erigena is not only
a concord or harmony between God and man. It is a seeing and a touching,
much as the “yes” spoken by spouses is transmuted in the visible flesh and the
intimate union of interlaced bodies: “God the Father calls men to exist [vocat
ut sint] by faith in his Son . . . Each day God calls men from the secret folds
of nature [vocat homines ex secretis naturae sinibus] where they are judged
as ‘non-being,’ in order that they may appear in a visible mode [ut appareant
visibiliter] in form and matter and through all the other properties by which
the hidden existents are able to make their appearance [in quibus occulta
apparere possunt].”112
The brilliance or irruption of what is seen—man or God, and the mani-
festation of God in man—only relays the word provided that the flesh more
adequately speaks, and speaks otherwise, the One who in his incarnation
has deliberately chosen this other language in order to speak to man (part II:
“The Flesh”). The Word does not stop speaking in order to enter into a com-
plete silence, but he proclaims by his body what his speech no longer has to
say. The profundity of the mystery of the flesh remains unfathomable—above
all when it is a matter of God: “Do not be surprised that the flesh, mortal
man, is able by grace to become a child of God [as we have already indicated
following Erigena’s comments on the Prologue of John], while it is even more
miraculous that the Word was made flesh [cum maioris miraculi sit verbum
caro factum]. Because if the superior has descended to the inferior, is it a
surprise that by the action of grace of the superior, the inferior is elevated up
to the superior? And all the more so as the Word was made flesh precisely
in order that man might become a child of God. The Word descended to
humanity in order that, by Him, man would be elevated to God [descendit
enim verbum in hominem ut, per ipsum, ascenderet homo in Deum].”113
The Incarnation is therefore not (as is sometimes wrongly thought) absent
from the concept of theophany in Erigena. On the contrary, the author of
the Periphyseon brings it to a fuller realization. More miraculous than the
resurrection (maioris miraculi), it accomplishes the descent (“from the supe-
rior to the inferior”) without which there is no ascent (“from the inferior
to the superior”). The birth of God in the flesh at the nativity already says
everything about the final glorification of the “children of God,” while itself
disclosing the figure of a God made in order to show himself—or rather in
order to be phenomenalized: “It is the unique Son of God in the flesh [in
74 God
carne]—man entirely assumed [hoc est in toto homine quem accepit]—who

not only has himself appeared [non solum seipsum aperuit], but has even
manifested to men God the Father [sed dum patrem hominibus manifestavit]
who up to then has remained unknown.”114
From the “Face to Face” to the Conjoint Clamor. The final face to face
with God (1 Cor. 13:12) does not reduce or suppress its visibility when it
pierces the mystery. Even into final beatitude “the blessed will see God face
to face [facies ad faciem], but calling face [faciem appelans] a comprehensible
appearance of the divine power for the human intellect [comprehensibilem
quandam humano intellectui divinae virtutis apparitionem].”115 The “face
of God” (facies Dei), understood here as a visage that appears instead of a
(now) translucent vision in a mirror, always remains visible at the same time
as irreducible. For Erigena, the final “face to face” (facies ad faciem) desig-
nates a sort of “encounter” or “direct confrontation,” where the brilliance of
the one (the face of God) never absorbs the visibility of the other (the face of
man)—since every “figure” or “facies” always makes visible an “appearance
of the divine power [apparitio divinae virtutis]”—even within the beatific
vision. For Erigena, the visible never flees into invisibility, for the theophanic
comprehensively maintains the total meaning of the economy of salvation.
There is a sort of “phenomenology of the call” in the creation and incarna-
tion that responds, like an echo, to this final “face to face” of man and God in
the resurrection. For the Father, the act of creation, and for the Son, the act of
incarnation, both witness to a common ambition toward visibility, the one by
his works and the other by his flesh. The condition sine qua non of their no
less common will to save, the divine appearance or the “God phenomenon”
indefatigably “races” toward humanity who sometimes nestles so far into the
depths of its obscurity that only a “conjoint clamor” of the Father and Son
(clamor) yet succeeds to draw it out: “In this way the Word of God cries out
[clamat] into the very distant solitude of the divine goodness . . . He it is who
calls [vocat] the things which are as though they were not; it is by him that
God the Father has cried out [clamavit], or created all that he has desired to
create. He has cried out in an invisible way [clamavit invisibiliter], before the
creation of the world, in order that the world would come into being; he has
cried out in a visible way [clamavit visibiliter] in coming into the world, in
order that the world would be saved. He has first cried out in eternity [prius
clamavit aeternaliter] before the incarnation, by his unique divinity; he has
cried out, then, by his flesh [clamavit postea per suam carnem].”116
By means of this “cry of the flesh” (clamavit per suam carnem), and with
salvation in view, Erigena opens Christianity to “another language”: first,
of the body (part II) and then the relation to the other (part III). Certainly,
the tension discovered in the Augustinian corpus between metaphysics and
God Phenomenon 75
theology remains (chapter 1). Erigena destroys or “deconstructs” the catego-

ries, as we have seen, instead of settling there and attempting to resolve their
conflict from within. The Irish theologian differs from the Bishop of Hippo
by the way he uses the negative theology of Denys (unknown, of course, by
Augustine), as well as in the attempt to overcome it that he puts in operation.
The “category of relation” (categoria relationis), so dear to Saint Augustine,
is here “predicable of God only in a metaphorical sense [translative de Deo
praedicare],” not in the sense that Erigena refuses substance or pleads for
some kind of self-sufficiency of the divine essence. To say that God is neither
“relational” nor “being” nor “love” does not signify, as we have seen, that
these categories are not fitting for his nature. Here one would fall back into
the double aporia of the “separation of orders” and the “de-hellenization of
dogma” that we have already denounced. Such a radical account of negation
in Erigena relative to Denys the Areopagite contrarily indicates only that the
language for speaking the “appearance of God” (apparitio Dei) exceeds that
which adheres to the “divine essence” (essentia divina), just as the ways of
being of God (as in “I see the Lord seated” of Is. 6:1 and other analogous for-
mulae) speak his being further or otherwise than all the categories inherited
from metaphysics, including “relation” (Augustine), and substance deter-
mined as “act of being” (Thomas Aquinas). The Dionysian apophaticism,
under the goad of Erigenism, endures a triple transformation which causes
it to leave definitively the sphere of invisibility (the cloud): (A) from the apo-
phatic, the designation of the divine first passes to the meta-ontological in
the impossible reduction of God to the modality of a thing; (B) from the
meta-ontological, the discourse on God is then announced in the context of
an apophantic logos, which negatively destroys the categories and positively
constructs the figure of God as “the One who runs and the One who sees”;
(C) and from the apophantic, God himself is finally unveiled as theophanic,
since man is never so anthropophanic as when he manifests God and himself
in the final “face to face” which constitutes their true encounter. In the “God
phenomenon” (Erigena), the call to the visible takes the place of the categori-
cal (Augustine) and the Neoplatonic requisite of the invisible (Denys).
A question nevertheless remains, and for now remains completely insol-
uble: is such an “appearance of God” not reduced, at least for man, to a
simple mode of its “reification”? For, starting from scripture, one could seek
to define a God first who “reveals himself” (ostendit) in his ways of being
rather than in his being. And it would again be necessary for the individual
believer to be rendered capable of receiving him in this way and not other-
wise. Speaking in the categories of the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar,
the “objective evidence” of the form of revelation simultaneously requires
“subjective evidence,” not in order to reduce the “form” to itself, but on
the contrary to render us capable of receiving it as we are in ourselves, as
living subjects, receivers of such an Appearance (Gestalt): “Not only intel-
lectual but existential prerequisites must be fulfilled in order that the form
76 God
that makes its claim on one’s total existence may also find a hearing in this
total existence.”117
The “God phenomenon” in John Scotus Erigena (chap. 2) therefore thor-
oughly overflows the “categorical God” as it was reworked in Saint Augustine
(chap. 1). But now we will focus on the act of faith that does not reduce God
to the status of a “thing,” if indeed neither God nor man meet the require-
ments of a “something” (non est quid). Personal conversion thus becomes the
condition of the non-reification of the One in whom we believe. It would be
necessary, in this case, to turn to Meister Eckhart and his notion of “detach-
ment” (Abgeschiedenheit) interpreted as a mode of the phenomenological
reduction that allows the “epochal conversion” of the receiving subject (chap.
3) in order to respond to the “phenomenality” of the appearing God (chap. 2).
Chapter 3
Reduction and Conversion (Meister Eckhart)
Phenomenology admits no “phenomena” apart from the method called the

reduction (epochê)—which, moreover, clearly distinguishes the theological
usage of the term (simple description of objective phenomena) from the spe-
cifically philosophical usage (suspension of the world and attention to acts
of consciousness).1 The tension between metaphysics and theology (chap. 1),
relayed by the “other discourse” of the God phenomenon (chap. 2), now
waits to be explored vis-à-vis the receiving subject who does not reify God
(chap. 3). For, if “God does not know what he is, it is because he is not some-
thing [Deus nescit se quid est quia non est quid],” then it is appropriate for
the believer or retreatant himself to take leave of all things, including the
conception of himself as a thing, in order to welcome God as no-thing: “Man
ought to be so poor that he would be and have no place where God is able to
act,” emphasizes Eckhart in his brilliant manner. He continues: “There where
man guards a place, he guards a difference.”2 The possible relation between
Eckhart and phenomenology is a familiar theme: in his course on The Founda-
tions of Medieval Mysticism (1918–1919), the young Heidegger returned to
the Thuringian as one who developed a “specific concept of knowledge”; and
Michel Henry continues the theme in his Essence of Manifestation (1963),
quasi-inverting it, seeing in the figure of the Dominican master the one who
enacts “the true critique of knowledge” understood as “exteriority” or “put-
ting at a distance.” Henry quotes Eckhart: “The Jews stood at a distance, and
it is precisely for this reason that they could not understand God.”3
If Heidegger or Henry’s debt to Eckhart is famous, then the father of phe-
nomenology himself, Edmund Husserl’s filiation from the Dominican master,
specifically concerning the passage from Eckhart’s conversion as “detach-
ment” (Abgeschiedenheit) to Husserl’s reduction as “bracketing” (epochê),
remains much less known. Noting this is not exactly catching an error in the
history of philosophy, especially since recent works have shown that it had
never really been forgotten.4 Rather, it is above all to demonstrate, at least
from the vantage of a reduction from God outside of his substantiality from
the outset (chaps. 1–3), that the subject itself ought also to submit to this mode
of epochê, at least in order not to reify the phenomenality of the One that it
77
78 God
is supposed to display. It is because an adequate logos is necessary in order to

“gather” (legein) the phaïnesthai of the apparitio Dei, as I have emphasized,
that John Scotus Erigena defines the conditions of the apophantic in order to
receive the apophatic (chap. 2). But it is Meister Eckhart who will establish
such a disposition in the believer that he will, as it were, convert himself from
within his natural attitude in order to be rendered capable of receiving God
phenomenologically (chap. 3). If Eckhartian detachment (Abgeschiedenheit)
is able to appear as a harbinger of Heideggerian “serenity” (Gelassenheit),
and if the “rose without why” of Angelus Silesius demonstrates the premoni-
tory meaning of Henry’s “auto-affection,” then the Husserlian “reduction”
also finds one of its possible origins explicitly in Eckhart. To climb toward the
mystical source of the phenomenological epochê is not simply to open onto
a phenomenological path, but onto a medievalist one at the same time. The
detour by Husserl—who, according to his private correspondences, had read
Eckhart’s Sermons (infra), appears in fact as the indispensable starting point
for a renewed interpretation of Meister Eckhart today, beyond Heidegger’s
filiation with which we are all so familiar. The necessity of a phenomeno-
logical practice measured by the mode of being of the medievals will find
in Eckhart its fruit—yet a fruit that, if not the safest to grasp, is at least the
ripest: that which is “essentially new about the phenomenological reduction”
(Husserl) is measured in fact by the “always new” of religious conversion
(Eckhart).5
From the Confession to a Twofold Secret

From Husserl’s confession in § 35 of the Crisis (1936), “reduction” and “con-
version” have always been tied together. The relation between them that lies
at the heart of medieval mysticism is therefore hardly arbitrary. To research
“religious conversion” as a mode of “phenomenological epochê” is on the
contrary a concern of the first phenomenologist himself: “Perhaps it will even
become manifest that the total phenomenological attitude and the epochê
belonging to it are destined in essence to effect, at first, a complete personal
transformation, comparable in the beginning to a religious conversion.”6
At least twice Husserl refers “personally” to the religious attitude as
foundational and explicative of phenomenology itself. He does this first in
relation to Meister Eckhart and then in conversation with Edith Stein. On
June 27, 1932, Husserl confided to Dorion Cairns that Eckhart was one of
phenomenology’s principle initiators: “I would be able to take over whole
pages of Meister Eckhart unchanged.”7 A private conversation with Edith
Stein in 1935 attests that “the life of man is nothing else than a path toward
God”: “I have attempted to get through to the end without the help of theol-
ogy, its proofs and its methods; in other words, I have wanted to attain God
without God.”8 However the goal is reached (the approach toward God),
Reduction and Conversion 79
whatever the final status of the “atheist way toward an authentic humanity,”9
it is therefore possible, and even probable, that Meister Eckhart was one of
the earliest vanguards of phenomenology because of his attempt to reduce all
exteriority to interiority, all objective realism to transcendental subjectivism
and all divine transcendence to the pure immanence of the ego: “However
remarkable the exit toward itself [extase)] is, remaining in itself [instase] is
something even higher,” Eckhart insists in his Treatise on Detachment. Simi-
larly, Husserl emphasizes in the Crisis: “The spirit, and indeed only the spirit,
exists in itself and for itself, is self-sufficient.”10 Husserl’s confiding to Dorian
Cairns and to Edith Stein, some years apart (1932 and 1935) therefore leaves
open the possibility that the influence of Meister Eckhart on the father of
phenomenology was more than merely occasional or secondary.
A Double Transcendence
The terms used by Husserl concerning the “phenomenological reduction”
recall in fact terms used currently to express “religious conversion”: thus
the “reduction” (epochê) is required to be understood as an experience “of
a totally other order” than the natural order, understood as the place of a
“new experience,” marked as a “radical modification of attitude.”11 A ques-
tion is nevertheless posed at the heart of this parallelism between Husserl and
Eckhart. An interdict is in fact thrown up by the master of phenomenology
as concerns all theological practice of the reduction, insofar as God himself
ought to be “put out of play” (Ideas I, § 58), by contrast to the “pure I”
which alone is maintained in this massive operation of suspension (Ideas I,
§ 57). The transcendence of the ego is distinguished from the transcendence
of God insofar as the second is reduced, but not the first: “Because of the
immediately essential role played by this transcendency [of the pure I] in the
case of any cogitation, we must not undertake its exclusion [§ 57],” whereas
“we extend the phenomenological reduction to include [God as] this ‘abso-
lute’ and ‘transcendent’ being. It shall remain excluded from the new field
of research which is to be provided, since this shall be a field of pure con-
sciousness [§ 58].”12 Certainly the ultimate God suspended here [§ 58] seems
rather distant from the truly religious consideration of a God that can be
believed in and who is the operator of conversion—indeed so much so that
Emmanuel Levinas himself will attest to having struggled “to take seriously”
these instructions of Husserl on God in the Ideas.13 There is no evidence
that the reduction of a “real transcendence” implies the suspension of “inten-
tional transcendence,” no more than the putting between parentheses of
“real immanence” leads us outside the circuit of “intentional immanence.”14
Briefly, the way of “transcendency within immanency”15 does not prohibit
thinking God himself as a phenomenological type of transcendence, that is to
say, as a mode of opening to the very heart of the intentional immanence of
the ego.16
80 God
Egocentrism and Theocentrism

Edith Stein, however, despite the sanctifying panegyrics offered justly in her
honor (as religious sister and saint, Benedicta of the Cross), is precisely the
one who, in my opinion, will forbid such a return to the ego in relation to
speaking of God. It is certainly appropriate to recognize the merit of the
future Carmelite in tracing the path that moves from phenomenology to
Thomism in the context of her conversion to Christianity. It is nevertheless
the case that the former assistant to Husserl will follow less the way of the
reduction of transcendence to immanence, than she will accentuate her own
way of conversion to God who is both absolute and objectively transcendent.
A text from 1929, offered in honor of Husserl’s seventieth birthday, testifies
to this, and, as far as the thought of Husserl goes, it is even doubtful that
what she offers is really a “gift” (as much as a critique). She states: “So, here
we may well have the sharpest contrast between transcendental phenomenol-
ogy and Catholic philosophy: the latter has a theocentric and the former an
egocentric orientation.”17 Phenomenological egocentrism is opposed there-
fore at every point to theological theocentrism, in an impassable distance
gaping between two boundary lines. Methodological atheism on one side
(Husserl) and objectivist theocentrism on the other (Stein), phenomenology
is definitively separated from theology to the point that no confrontation
between them would be foreseeable, nor any longer possible: We “can start
with nothing but the ego cogito,” insists Husserl in his Cartesian Medita-
tions,18 and as Alexander Löwith comments in a definitive fashion, “Husserl
therefore is not able to search for the solution of his problem in theology but
rather in egology.”19
The Choice of Eckhart

Does this mean that one cannot today return to the ego in order to constitute
a new mode of theology—not opposed to Thomism, of course, but rather
more apt to articulate the doctrine “in such a way as to correspond to the
particular demands of our time”?20 The choice of Eckhart, which could seem
to some a passing fad, is in fact particularly judicious for taking advantage of
the sermons of the “brother preacher” to the Beguines for the sake of renew-
ing an egocentric philosophy which is revealed to be theocentric as well, and
capable of illuminating theology’s own ambition toward renewal. If the pro-
fessor of Göttingen and Fribourg im Breisgau certainly read the master from
Thuringia (as the discussion with Cairns of 1932 discloses) and also perhaps
underwent an experience of conversion (as the discussion with Stein in 1935
insinuates), it is not certain that he has reduced or “put out of play” God him-
self in the same way at the end of his career (in the Krisis, Fribourg period) as
at the beginning (in Ideas I, Göttingen period). Let us make no mistake, how-
ever. It is not a question here of a hijacking, of which the phenomenologists
are sometimes so poorly accused when they also write theology, but only the
testimony of an encounter between a mystical path on the one hand (Eck-
hart) and a phenomenological way of thought on the other (Husserl). There
is always something insidious about “forced baptisms,” which are disrespect-
ful of modes of thought that are never avowedly Christian. It is still the case
that a return to an interiority which is also capable of engendering and even
constituting a world (be it God’s), finds in Eckhart its first roots inasmuch
as it is first investigated there. Eckhart confides in “Sermon 4”: “I once said
that I am not properly capable of putting into speech that which moves from
the interior to the exterior . . . : that ought not to come from the exterior,
on the contrary, it must exit from the interior.”21 That word which is like
speech coming from the mouth is also, and eminently, the Son as Word who
comes out of the mouth of God. If it is fitting for us also to “engender God
the very God” (infra), it would not in this sense be a theocentrism outside of
a certain form of egocentrism, which should not be confused of course with
all the forms of egoism of the subject which do not have anything to do with
its return to itself.22
We will follow the counsel of Eckhart in the Talks of Instruction (Rede
der Unterweisung) since he confirms all the recommendations of Husserl,
as well as Heidegger later, concerning the conditions of access to the things
themselves as moments of lived experience of consciousness: “Begin therefore
first of all by yourself, and let yourself [be].”23 It no longer suffices to speak
of God as “relation” covered over by substance (chap. 1), nor of extracting
the conditions of his theophany in order to disclose in it the possibility of a
certain phenomenality (chap. 2), but only principally to center the discourse
on the mode of being of the subject that receives, even produces, the phenom-
enon “God” (chap. 3). Will such an engendering of the divine starting from
the ego be reduced to a simple “ontological monism” or a “pure immanence”
in a quasi-identification of man and God (Henry)?24 Will the hypothesis of an
“articulated monism” of exteriority and interiority have anything further to
say within a more dialectical perspective (P.-J. Labarrière)?25 These questions,
which are today at the heart of many, often extreme conflicts, should in real-
ity return us to the texts: is the phenomenological epochê, as Husserl thinks
it, capable of illuminating the Eckhartian movement of religious conversion
and its proper detachment (Abgeschiedenheit)? And does this Eckhartian
abandonment allow a return, as if by an automatic recoil, to the pretended
exclusion of the theological by the egological (Ideas I, § 58)? These are the
true questions that it would be necessary for us to reinvestigate independently
of every polemic, most of which are usually as sterile as they are trivial.
Rereading Eckhart in light of phenomenology, we come to see biblical
figures as models of theological “conversion” that illustrate this path of a
“progressive reduction,” the philosophical resiliency of which will not be
without consequences for theology itself: (A) the reduction to the I, or the
apprenticeship of Mary of Bethany; (B) the constitution of God, or the
82 God
fecundity of Martha; (C) egoity as nihilation, or the figure of Paul. In each

biblical figure, reread phenomenologically (Mary, Martha, Paul), as in each
posture (reduction, constitution, nihilation), something is articulated of the
suspension of a self gradually rendered capable of receiving the God phe-
nomenon as such. On this progressive and radical return toward an egoity in
love with the divinity (1st part), will depend then our own capacity to receive
God in his flesh as in ours (2nd part), as well as the urgency of constituting
together a common world which no longer forgets the other as condition of
all singularity (3rd part).
The Reduction to the I: The Apprenticeship of Mary (of Bethany)
It seems that the originality of Meister Eckhart is found in his prioritization

of the exegesis of Holy Scripture in order to aid philosophical problems.26
But such a process, in Eckhartian discourse as in the context of a “phenom-
enological praxis,” is not reduced to the simple usage of the natural light
(philosophy) in order then to clarify the supernatural (theology). On the con-
trary, by using another light (that of God, being, art, etc.) the believer, like
the phenomenologist, will uncover the light of another intentionally dwelling
within (the Trinity, other people, aesthetic dazzlement, etc.). The figures of
Martha and Mary of Bethany, so dear to Eckhart (serm. 2 and serm. 86) will
serve as the Ariadne’s thread to follow the path that leads, step by step, from
the “reduction to the I” to the “constitution of God in the I”—and thus makes
religious conversion a possible mode of the phenomenological reduction.
Natural Attitude and Phenomenological Reduction

“As they (the disciples) continued on their way, Jesus entered into a village
and a woman named Martha received him into her house” (Lk. 10:38). This
famous episode of Martha and Mary, particularly in its introductory section
just quoted, serves as the fulcrum of a rare philosophical exegesis in Meister
Eckhart (“Sermon 2” and “Sermon 86”).27 Indeed, Martha, ordinarily accused
of dishonestly dealing with her sister who on the contrary chose “the better
part,” actually does a work of kindness according to Eckhart and hence out-
classes even Mary of Bethany by her true sense of obedience in a “detached”
hearing of God. Here everything is inverted. The one who is most often repri-
manded for her jealousy (Martha) is in reality the one who is recognized for
her quality of empathy toward her sister (Mary)—seeing that which her sister
has not yet understood, the “reduction” itself: “Lord, command her to help
me (Lk. 10:40).” “This,” emphasizes Eckhart, “Martha says not by contrari-
ety, rather: she speaks from a benevolence which compels her.”28
The “reductive” reading of the conversion alone explains this strange
reversal of a traditional malice and a surprising benevolence. Where Martha
stunningly practices the phenomenological epochê and opens a path to it for

her sister (hence her benevolence), Mary remains in the “natural attitude,”
taking God in a worldly or “thetic” manner, as a “reality” always at once
existing and objective (Wirklichkeit).29
Mary, or the Natural Attitude. By contrast to a hasty reading of this passage

from the Gospel, the natural attitude, or in other terms that which entertains
the most ordinary relation to things and to beings, is signified by Mary of
Bethany rather than Martha—especially as Mary herself would with all her
heart “remain sitting at the Lord’s feet listening to his word” (Lk. 10:39).
Indeed there is nothing here that excludes the fact that Martha, taken up
with “the multiple cares of serving her guests” (Lk. 10:40) is actually not
listening, as it were, to that which listening signifies, that is, obedience: “In
true obedience,” Eckhart emphasizes, “she has completely exited from herself
into God.”30 To hear or to obey, since they share the same root (akouô), is
primarily understood by Eckhart as to climb out of or to undo the self—or
better, as a certain mode of self in its relation to the world. Who is the one
who truly hears and obeys in this passage from the Gospel? That is, who
discards more of the conception of God as “thing” and understands him as
act of a “life in itself”? Not Mary, who sits, far from quotidian occupations,
absorbed in God as “thing,” but rather Martha—who stands “with or close
to things” without being “in things.”31 The true concern of Martha is less in
finding help for serving her guests (Lk. 10:40) than of fearing for her sister
insofar as she remains in a simple posture of hearing from God: “She feared
that her sister remained stuck in the feeling of well-being and failed to be
elevated to a higher state.”32
Martha does not have the concern of self in a busy relation with the world,
but concern for the other who remains in a relation of absorption in God.
Fearing for her sister, Martha accuses Mary not for her failure to engage in
material tasks, but rather for her non-detachment from a purely sensible and
reifying listening. Translated into the phenomenological language of Husserl,
Mary remains in some sense beholden to the natural attitude and therefore
“perceives the world, and lives there, in a completely natural way being inter-
ested in it”—that is, here, in the world of God.33 Mary, if she is attached and
absorbed in listening to the Lord, is progressively lost in him in a “sensible
delight”—“lost in the world,” Eckhart says “lost in things, lost in ideas, lost
in the plants and the beasts . . . : outside, diverted.”34 In being forgotten out
in the world the sister of Martha is so to speak “already ready to be treated
as a thing in the world” as Ricoeur said in commenting on Husserl.35 The
apprenticeship of Mary led by Martha becomes in a sense the phenomeno-
logical epochê: “Martha says ‘Lord order her to help me’ (Lk. 10:40), as if
she had said: my sister believes that she can do what she wants as long as she
is sitting close to you in consolation. Let her see if all is well and order her to
rise up and leave you.”36
84 God
Martha therefore does not require that Mary be attached to things in being
preoccupied with quotidian aspects of the world, as a much too rapid reading
of her own business as a form of natural attitude. On the contrary, she desires
that her sister be detached from the Lord as “thing” (Abgeschiedenheit), a sort
of phenomenological reduction. In Husserl’s terms, yet remaining aware of
too abrupt a rapprochement, Martha requires that Mary should not lack, like
Descartes much later, “the transcendental orientation,” letting the cogito slide
down into the res cogitans, to the point of a surreptitious affirmation of a new
“realism” of the subject, which definitively annihilates it as a pure I or ego
constitutive of the world.37 If, as we have seen (chap. 2), Erigena in some sense
liberates the “God phenomenon” in order to allow it to appear in its modes
of appearing rather than in its essence (“I see the Lord, seated on a throne”
and other formulae), Eckhart, in producing the necessary detachment that
makes it impossible for God to be identified within the mode of being of “sub-
stance,” portrays man as a receptor of a non-reified divine (chap. 3). It is not
sufficient simply to confirm that God is not “some thing” (non est quid); again
it would be necessary that this non-reification attains the practical modality of
man himself in his apprehension of God—that is, in his “detachment” from
things in general and particularly from God as thing (Eckhart). It is Martha’s
task to teach her sister this “conversion of self” as a mode of phenomenologi-
cal epochê, operating already from herself and on herself, that is, according to
Eckhart’s remarkable formula, teaching her “no longer to take God as if you
would wrap his head in a coat and stuff it under a bench.”38
Martha, or the Phenomenological Epochê. The Lord’s response to Martha—

“Martha, Martha, you concern yourself with many things, and only one
thing is necessary” (Lk. 10:41–42)—cannot nor should not be interpreted as
a reproach of Martha by Jesus, no more than what Martha said to Mary was
a tirade, since it advocated that she leave the Lord and detach herself from
being buried in the world of things—or rather, the world of God consid-
ered as a thing. For Eckhart, “you concern yourself” (Lk 10:41) means, “You
stand along with things and the things are not in you”; or again, “You stand
near things and not in things.”39
Eckhart’s positive conception of “care”—contrary to the Sorge of Hei-
degger,40 is the condition of a proper understanding of this passage. When the
Lord says, “you concern yourself,” normally understood in a negative way,
it is necessary actually to read: “You are watchful, Martha.”41 This signifies
not that Martha is busy with all the needs of service and attempts to lead her
sister into them, but only that she worries with Jesus about seeing Mary so
objectively seated “at the feet of the Lord” that she is rendered incapable of
breaking from him and living according to the mode of reduction, and thus
that she remains in some sense “along with” him instead of being “in” him.
The relation of inherence indicated by the second formula (“being in” or
“being within”) takes precedence over the relation of proximity indicated by
the first (“being near” or “being with”). Martha holds the Lord “in her,” or
rather is taken “in him,” that is, “in the kitchen” (inherence), so she does not
necessarily have to be there like Mary, seated “before” him, in the locality
of encounter or of attentive hearing (proximity). The “reduced” presence of
the Lord in Martha or of Martha in the Lord withdraws in some sense from
the objective mode of their relation, which constitutes the greatest objection
to the resurrection. “I am with you [vobiscum] always even until the end of
the age” declares Christ at the end of Matthew (Mt. 28:20)—not because
the Resurrection One is there present “before us” or “with us” (proximity),
but in the sense alone that he is “in us” or that we are “in him” (inherence).
“If someone says to you ‘the Messiah is here [hic] or that he is there [illic],’
do not believe them . . .”; he is not here [non est hic] because he has been
raised as he has said (Mt. 24:23; 28:6). Translated into phenomenological
terms, “detachment” (Abgeschiedenheit), reread as a mode of “reduction”
(epochê), operates principally in the resurrection, and even accomplishes
God’s “apperceptive transposition of the other,” that man, in himself, is inca-
pable of realizing.42
The shared concern (of Jesus and Martha for Mary) has in this sense a
positive meaning in Eckhart as it keeps man “in the middle of things” and
things “in the middle of man” without however leaving him “consumed by
them.” Contrary to Heidegger, Eckhart’s “care” protects man from being
thrown into the world and consumed by it. Retroactively returning to the
second Heidegger, the just “care” of Eckhart remains more on the side of
“dwelling” or the being “at home” of man with the world (bauen) than of
“care” or being “outside of self” and projected into the world (besorgen).
Such care is “vigilance” in an authentic relation with the world and not
“being-in-and-before-oneself,” always escaping oneself, lost and forgotten in
a worldly preoccupation.43
The “at Home” of Egoity. The reduction of Martha in her positive relation
of care to the world is therefore accomplished in a manner that is all the more
remarkable insofar as it does not negate care but realizes through it a sort of
“suspension” or “bracketing” of the world, which does not destroy the world
but is uniquely attached to a proper lived experience of the world: “Martha,
and all the friends of God along with her, stand with care, not in care . . . ;
she stood among things, not in things.”44 Like the phenomenological epochê
(Ideas I, § 31), indeed, like a counter to Cartesian doubt or Hegelian dialectic
in advance, the Eckhartian detachment accomplished by Martha (Abgeschie-
denheit) neither destroys nor annihilates the world. Instead, it consecrates the
world as a place of relation, of the unveiling of an interiority that constitutes
it as such: “The little phrase that I have cited earlier says: God has sent his
only Son into the world (1 Jn. 4:9). You ought not to relate to him in the
exterior world where Christ ate and drank with us; you ought to understand
it from the interior world.”45
86 God
The “little city” or “small fortress” into which Jesus enters in Bethany
is thus Martha’s and not Mary’s—who is not mentioned by the Evangelist:
“Jesus entered into a village, and a woman, named Martha, received him into
her home” (Lk. 10:38). The place where God resides has nothing to do with
Mary’s comfortable residing “at the feet of the Lord” (Lk. 10:39) in the mode
of a thing among things. In the world of beings God remains “without home”
or “without place,” “u-topic” (u-topos). He does not “subsist” in the house of
Martha in the mode of being made present (“presentification”), as he would
be under the reifying regard of Mary in the “natural attitude.” Rather, he pen-
etrates into the “small fortress” of Martha as into her “depths.” Suspending
or bracketing the world of things (epochê), Martha moves from her sister to
the middle of the world of quotidian tasks without reducing God to a thing.
Precisely because God remains within her, she is able to be elsewhere (in the
kitchen) and to conserve God within (in her fortress). In contrast to Mary
who in leaving God would lose the one whom she had reified, Martha lives
with the fullness of the Spirit, which only theology allows one to recognize.
The discovery of egoity in Eckhart, like the subject in Augustine, finds its rea-
sons in mysticism—in which theology precedes and founds the philosophical
approach: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). One
would therefore be very wrong in wanting to “de-theologize” medieval phi-
losophy, and Eckhart in particular. The mystical and Augustinian movement
of introspection finds its culmination in medieval theology and especially in
Eckhart. The “at home” of Martha in her egoity, rather than remaining to be
defined, stands as a figurehead of all egological philosophy, in order to reach
God within: “At home,” insists Eckhart, “that is, seeing God without inter-
mediary, in his own being.”46
The emphasis on Eckhart in the Essence of Manifestation (the focus of
the only section uniquely centered on an author) was able to lead Michel
Henry to interpret the “world” as interior world (I Am the Truth) and the
flesh as the experience of pure auto-affection (Incarnation). In both cases it
is actually Eckhart who speaks: “interior world” without exteriority, on the
one hand, and “auto-affected flesh” without body on the other hand. We
have shown that it is appropriate to interrogate these decisions anew—less in
order to reject them than to understand the type of phenomenality that they
have engendered. The subject in whom God comes to dwell is not first given
in the empirical I that can always be decomposed, but in the transcendental
I all the more interiorized as it obtains the One who comes to be manifested
in it.47
Empirical I and Transcendental I

To Say “I”: Neither This nor That. Indeed, some have interpreted this
identity of the “at home” or the “being one’s own” in Eckhart either as a
dialectical unity of differences (a “gathering together”),48 or as the place of a
suppression of all intentionality (auto-affectivity).49 It is hardly necessary to

overtake Hegel (P.-J. Labarrière) or to take leave of Husserl (Henry) in order
to carry out a phenomenological practice of the reduction like that of Meis-
ter Eckhart. The “little town of Bethany” or “little fortress” where Jesus was
received (castellum), such that it no longer designates only a geographic place
but the very person of Martha, confers on her ego an inviolable role: that of a
“pure ego,” an original transcendence that could never be “put out of play.”50
What Eckhart calls the “I” is not an empirical or countable collection of
powers of the soul that we see in all the “psychical” classifications inherited
from Aristotle: imagination, volition, intellection, and so on. Nor does the
“little fortress” signify merely a “power in the spirit,” a “rampart of spirit,” a
“light of the spirit,” or even a “little spark,” even though Eckhart himself uses
these expressions (and one ought to attend to their specific use in “Sermon
2”). “Powers of the soul” and “inner light” remain too reifying to signify the
truth of the manifestation of God as such. Rather, Martha seeks to teach her
sister the phenomenological discovery of bracketing the empirical nature of
experience and returning to the transcendental ego as lived experience or the
collection of the acts of consciousness. Eckhart says: “Our little inner fortress
is neither here nor there; yet it is something elevated beyond here or there.”51
Husserl emphasizes that the transcendental ego itself as reduced “is not
a piece of the world” and the objects of the world “are not real pieces [of
my ego].”52 It is therefore not appropriate to define the ego according to
the mode of the world—power, rampart, light, sparks, and so on. Like Hus-
serl’s transcendental ego “carrying the unity of the world’s meaning” without
itself being in the world,53 the “soul in its ground [Seelengrund] is,” accord-
ing to Eckhart, “as inexpressible as God.”54 Because it is necessary—and here
Eckhart advances beyond all failures of Cartesianism—not to confound the
pure ego (as seat of meaning or the ego in its ground) and the empirical ego
(properties of the ego as properties of the soul), Eckhart will progressively
renounce the word “soul” which “does not signify the ground [Grund] and
has not reached human nature”55—which Descartes in his time precisely does
not do by folding the cogito into the res cogitans.56
The One Thing Necessary: Detachment. By realizing, on the one hand,

the phenomenological epochê by means of the suspension of God as thing,
without failing, at the same time, to move to the heart of the world, and,
on the other hand, by constituting the root of the soul as pure me or seat
of meaning [foyer du sens], Martha exhibits—according to the Treatise on
Detachment—the exemplary figure of the Abgeschiedenheit: “Our Lord says
to Martha: ‘The one who wants to be without trouble and clear, she ought to
have one thing—detachment.’ ”57
The only “necessary thing” granted to Mary by the Lord (Lk. 10:42) is
therefore not such that “the better part” would be either possessed by Mary
(absorption of self in listening to the Lord) or prohibited to Martha (by virtue
88 God
of her busyness in the world). On the contrary, and against the unworthiness
of such a comparison in the eyes of God, this “better [part]” paradoxically
indicates to Eckhart that it is a matter of Mary taking part in the better already
possessed by Martha—of “happening” herself upon the one thing necessary,
that is, onto detachment, which alone renders blessed. It is as if Christ said:
“Be reassured and not indignant, Martha, your sister Mary has chosen the
better part [Lk. 10:42]; she must pass through this. The greatest thing which
can happen to the creature must happen to it: she must become blessed as
you are.”58 It has often been emphasized that it is wrong to oppose the two
sisters—the active life on the one hand (Martha) and the contemplative life
on the other (Mary). For Meister Eckhart’s Dominican predecessor, Thomas
Aquinas, the well-ordered Christian life is “mixed” (active and contempla-
tive). We will have a chance to see the endorsement given to this position by
Saint Bonaventure (chap. 6).59 Eckhart of course radicalizes the concept, and
sees contemplation at the heart of action. Or better: he makes action, as con-
cerned immersion in things, the condition of contemplation, as presence of
God in himself as non-thing. The “detachment” from God as thing (by virtue
of action) makes possible the reception and manifestation of God in himself
as non-thing (contemplation). In Eckhart there is not a separation between
a purely active life and a purely contemplative life—yet neither is there a
Dominican “mixed life,” well ordered by active and contemplative faith. On
the contrary, contemplation is lived at the heart of action—not in the sense
that one sees or prays to God through action, but rather insofar as action
achieves the necessary “detachment” from God as thing, producing thereby a
new “attachment” to God for his own sake and as the “nothing” of all things.
The Fullness of God: Attachment. Detachment, simultaneously from things

and from their modality as thing (being absorbed in listening to the Lord), is
not operative outside of a new attachment to God and to his proper mode of
being: “Detachment makes me receptive to nothing but God.”60 The empti-
ness of Abgeschiedenheit in the relation of man to creatures ought not to
obscure the plenitude of his attachment to God, in a listening which is no
longer a mere sensible delight (Mary of Bethany), but is elevated, on the
contrary, beyond into a “letting go” of oneself and the world (Martha).61
“Listening” is here “obedience” insofar as it reveals the dependence of the
listening to the one who is listened to, a dependence that is all the more
stringent as it abolishes the distance between the emitter and the receiver,
ordinarily established in the relation to the other and to God, understood
as things or “being there” (like Mary “seated at the feet of the Lord”). The
emptiness of the self liberates in this way a space for the fullness of God or
rather makes space itself the place of the fullness of God. The numerous Bud-
dhist or Zen interpretations of Eckhart have not adequately grappled with
its properly Christian intention. Better—and we will return to this below in
relation to Bernard of Clairvaux’s correction of the “mysticism of pathos
[mystique pathetique]” of Origen (chap. 7)—“detachment” does not have

meaning in and for itself, any more than “nothing” should be sought in pure
vacuity. On the one hand, one is only “detached” from God as thing in which
one delights in an exterior manner, because one is “attached” to a God as life
interiorly: “ ‘Lord, command her to get up!’ says Martha to Jesus about her
sister, as if she said: ‘Lord, I would love that she not be seated there in delight;
I would love for her to learn to live, that she would possess it essentially.’ ”62
On the other hand, one is only “empty” and understood as a subject before
God because we let ourselves be fully filled by the whole of our source as
a fontal plenitude. As Eckhart says in his Treatise on Detachment: “To be
empty of every creature is to be full of God, and to be full of every creature is
to be empty of God.”63 The life of God in himself gives way to or replaces the
relation of the thing to the self’s exterior; and the whole of the divine takes
the place of the whole of the human, including the very idea of a place, which
alone justifies the nothing of all creatures in relation to the Creator.
True “poverty,” the central focus of the commentary on the first beatitude
(“Blessed are the poor in spirit”), is not simply the index of a humble man
“drawn from the earth” (Adamâ) and returning to the “earth” (humus).64
Instead, in the Eckhartian and metaphysical reading of the “poor man,” it
stems from the absence of distance and of place in which to receive God,
which again would be for him a sign of wealth. Eckhart certainly abolishes
differences, which gives rise to perhaps an appropriate suspicion that he has
not fully respected the necessary difference between Creator and creature.
But it is not the case that in this ontological suppression there hides a mysti-
cal position more than a philosophical thesis. In order to give his entire place
to God man no longer has a place: not as if he wanted to leave his place (dei-
fication), or even to fill all place (pride), but rather that the action of having a
place is for him some sort of “de-place” (detachment)—whereas it is for God
alone to take the place that he will have determined in constituting our ego-
ity (attachment): “man ought to be so poor that he has no place where God
would be able to operate [as I have already indicated, following Eckhart].
There where man guards a place, he guards a difference.”65
Far from the Augustinian tension of “relation” and “substance” which
always conserves a certain exteriority between the poles (chap. 1), like
distance in Dionysian apophaticism and even like proximity in Erigenian
theophany (chap. 2), the poverty of Eckhartian detachment creates such a
coincidence of man and God that the subject itself loses its being in the noth-
ing of its egoity (chap. 3). In the experience of Abgeschiedenheit, I am never
more “me” than when I am not or no longer “me”—not in fusion with God
but detached from myself in order to receive God. We empty ourselves only
in order to be full of God. The detachment from self, which includes the
detachment from a reified God, thus marks the attachment to the deity by a
suspension or a reduction from the world and myself, which finally “leaves”
God to be God (Gelassenheit—a concept to which we will return). It would
90 God
be necessary to insist: the Christian plenitude of an attachment to an iden-

tified Other (deity as Trinity) remains much more present in Eckhart than
does the vacuity of the Buddhist type, a simple annihilation of the creature
to the point of a total lack of differentiation with God himself. The second
(the annihilation of the creature) is an expression of the first (the identi-
fied affirmation of the Trinity); the first (attachment to the Trinity) is not an
expression of the second (detachment in nothing). Hence Alain de Libera: “If
Eckhart sometimes seems to flirt with Trinitarian heresy, that is because we
do not understand and do not recognize what he is saying, transmitted and
transposed into the coarse idiom of his predication.” Lefert confirms: “The
theology of Eckhart always remains Trinitarian: because the world is created
in the Word, the divinized soul participates in the creation of the world.”
Such is the meaning of the famous affirmation in “Sermon 29,” which fol-
lows the Trinitarian monadology initiated by Bonaventure: “Insofar as God
perceives in me, I perceive myself in him.”66
The suspension of the world and the discovery of the pure I therefore
does not suffice, in phenomenology as much as theology, to engender a new
world— now generated starting from a subject detached from itself and
attached to God. Poor in his detachment and believing in his attachment, the
believer himself ought to be rendered capable of constituting a new world—
the world of God precisely, where the concept of “birth” unlocks the meaning
of the Word even today, starting from a self mediated by another (reverse
intentionality) and no longer locked within the solus ipse of being closed in
on itself (solipsism).
The Constitution of God: The Fecundity of Martha
Having been accused of reifying God in relation to “Mary seated at the feet of
the Lord,” should egology [Ideas I, § 57] banish theology [Ideas I, § 58] in an
intensified reverse opposition, from a supposed theocentrism that suppresses
egocentrism? The objection would be valid, but only to the degree that its
conception of theology is objective and not relative to the object (objectale)
within the insurmountable relation of God and the ego. It is precisely this,
however, that Eckhart refuses, discovering the inverse: namely the strange
possibility for man of engendering the first (God) starting from the second
(the ego) and thus giving birth to God starting from that which is human.
After having negatively reduced or bracketed God as thing (the “reduction to
the I” or the apprenticeship of Mary), Eckhart positively shows the astonish-
ing possibility for man of giving birth to the divine starting from this reduced
I (the “constitution of God” or the fecundity of Martha). The argument
passes from “reduction” to “constitution,” or from Mary to Martha insofar
as they exemplify this transfer. Explicitly naming the apprenticeship of Mary,
Eckhart emphasizes: “That the human being receives God into himself, it is
well, and in this receptivity he is intact.” Eckhart continues, this time desig-
nating the work of Martha: “But that God would become fruitful in him, it
is better; because the fecundity of the gift is only the gratitude for the gift.”67
Martha, pregnant with God, under the form of the “little fortress into
which Jesus has entered” (intravit Jesus in quoddam castellum), ought now
to generate the one who has in some way made her fruitful. It is no longer
sufficient merely to find God within, which was the condition for remain-
ing at once tied to the things (in the kitchen) and present to God (in a more
intimate way). It is necessary now to engender God as “no-thing,” that is,
as “no one” [personne] or “flux” for which the very act of birth depends at
least as much on the human soul which comes to generate it, as on its exis-
tence in its avowed objectivity. Hence Angelus Silesius said (at least in this
respect a perfect disciple of Eckhart): “If Christ is born a thousand times in
Bethlehem and not in you, then you remain forever lost.”68 Otherwise said,
God is “act” and not “being” for Eckhart. Neither relation still bound to sub-
stance (Augustine), nor simple appearing phenomenon (Erigena), nor even
“act of being” formulated in the terms of a revised metaphysics (Aquinas),
the divine is here pure “deity”—in Eckhart’s language: “generativity” and
not “substantiality,” “flux,” “flow,” or “effusion” and not “substance,” which
is definitively abandoned in the name of a mysticism “detached” from all
objectivity. Jesus responds to Martha: “ ‘There is one thing necessary’ [Lk.
10:42] and not two.” This no longer means here simply that Mary is seated
at the feet of the Lord, one the one hand, and Martha is busy in the kitchen,
on the other. On the contrary, it signifies that “you and I (Martha and Jesus)
make one, once enveloped in eternal light.”69 Eckhart always says in relation
to Martha: “It is still a power which is equally incorporeal: it flows out of
the spirit and remains in the spirit and is in every way spiritual.”70 The divine
cogitatum imprinted onto the human cogitatio thus transforms the meaning
of all thought (intentionality), in the same way that the engendering of the
divine starting from the human makes of the believer himself a being capable
finally of giving birth (generativity).
Intentionality
Work and Activity. Martha, by way of the “phenomenological I”—or the
“disinterested spectator” in relation to the world into which she refuses to
be absorbed (Husserl)—neither leaves nor negates the world, since “care”
understood as “vigilance” at the very least maintains it in the lived modality
of things without itself being a thing.71 Articulated in Eckhart’s terms, Martha
is detached from “work” in no longer being in things but remains neverthe-
less in the “activity” by remaining with things: “work [Werk] is when one is
exercised exteriorly in works of virtue; but ‘activity’ [Gewerk] is when one
is exercised interiorly with reasonable discretion.”72 An identical and first
step is accomplished therefore in the phenomenological epochê as in religious
92 God
conversion. It is in the inner transformation of the self (activity [Gewerk])

that the world is suspended or one is converted to God, and not in the simple
obedience to external rules (work [Werk]). Such a return above the self does
not imply that God or the world are not able to exist independently of the I.
It indicates only that the lived experience of the world like the lived experi-
ence of God designate for me the “thing itself”—the act of my consciousness
by which the world and God are seen at once.
A kind of work on the self is therefore necessary for the method of the
reduction” as for the “act of conversion,” since it rejects the temptation to
make of God an objective reality (existing in himself independently of me)
in order to show his objectal data (constituted by the meaning that he gives
and that I give to myself). Work and activity (Werk and Gewerk) are in this
sense for Martha among the modes of her intentionality, that is, manners
of looking at things rather than of living among them: in no longer being
only “in” things as work external to the self (Werk), Martha remains “with”
things as an “activity” internal to the self (Gewerk).73 Jesus names Martha
twice: “Martha, Martha, you are concerned with many things” (Lk. 10:41).
Why, Eckhart asks, “does Christ name Martha twice?”74 The first appella-
tion “attests her perfection in temporal works” (Werk) whereas the second
“attests to everything that is required for eternal beatitude”: activity or inter-
nal exercise (Gewerk). There are not two Marthas, one busy in the kitchen
and the other attentive to the self within as well as to God, but rather two
different manners of intentionally aiming at God and things, even, for a time
at least, of recognizing God in things: “You worry yourself” (Lk. 10:41) is not
the negative formulation of a reproach of a person wholly absorbed in the
quotidian, but the positive recognition of this religious and phenomenologi-
cal capacity of remaining “with,” “near,” or even “very near” things without
being “in” things: “I say very near because every creature performs the duty
of intermediary.”75
Neither the things themselves nor the world are denounced in Eckhart
(which is why a purely auto-affective reading, as in Henry, is not fully justi-
fied), but rather the relation to things and to the world. If true “activity”
(Gewerk)—as we will shortly see—is being “free and stripped of all interme-
diary,” understood particularly as the very idea of an intermediary, creatures
nevertheless perform at least at first the “duty of intermediary.” By them we
experience our own power of remaining concerned along with things (in one-
self in the kitchen, for example) without being in things (that is, absorbed
in the things of the world, or in God as thing). With the Dominican mas-
ter’s rereading of the episode of Mary and Martha—much like Husserlian
intentionality— the relation to things is changed, though not the things
themselves, which are in no way annihilated. Said otherwise, the world does
not disappear in Eckhart, as it does for the Cartesian dubitatio, but it is in
some way “bracketed” or “reduced” in order to leave the mode of objectivity
behind. Abgeschiedenheit is a mode of the epochê as “detachment” diverting
consciousness from its relation to things in order to show its lived experience
of things—of all things the only thing necessary: “Detachment [Abgeschie-
denheit] is free from all creatures. This is why the Lord says to Martha that
only one thing is necessary.”76 God is not objectively given exteriorly but
is intentionally engendered interiorly. Such is the message of Eckhart who
shows his originality—inasmuch as he is reread in light of the concept of
intentionality.
The Ground of the Soul and of God

But Eckhart is not content with these intermediaries of work and of activity—
exercise from the exterior and from the interior—in order to rediscover God
in the depths of the self. As I have emphasized, Eckhart demonstrates his
radicality in his assertion of the “other intermediary” which does not pass by
way of creatures at all, but rather is “to be denuded from the all” that is, from
all intermediary: “The one who works in the light, he is elevated toward God,
free and denuded of every intermediary; his light is his activity, and his activ-
ity is his light.”77 One should certainly be surprised at seeing a Dominican
rejecting every intermediary or mediation, while another Dominican, only
a few decades earlier (Aquinas) had on the contrary made the relation of
primary and secondary causes the heart of all his teaching.78 Their aim is not
the same: Thomas’s is ontological and Eckhart’s is mystical. The weight that
Thomas loans to the world is totally granted to the subject in Eckhart. The
“one thing necessary” that Christ requires of Martha is their divine-human
unity in the interpenetration of their consciousnesses, and not the reifying
relation with the other exemplified by Mary: “She is doubled who does not
see God without intermediary.”79 This teaching is the origin of Eckhart’s
famous identification of the ground of the soul and the ground of God, in
which not only is the human called to the divine, but also in itself engenders
God the very God: “Here the ground of God is my ground, and my ground
the ground of God.”80
There is no lack of astonishment here from both the philosophical and
theological perspectives. (a) First, on the philosophical side, phenomenologists
in particular have relied on this quasi-total identification of the divine and the
human in order to interpret Eckhart’s thought as a total immanentism: “The
ontological identity of the soul and God expresses and likewise signifies the
identity in being of its reality and phenomenality on the metaphysical level”
(Henry).81 In this sense to affirm, following Eckhart, that God is made man
“in order that I give birth to God, the very God” (“Sermon 29”), is to iden-
tify man and God completely and therefore definitively loses any meaning
for transcendence.82 In 1969 Brunner had foreseen this only a few years after
the publication of the Essence of Manifestation (1963): “It is absurd to assert
that the unity of the soul and God puts divine transcendence in peril because
the soul which is one with God has left itself and is nothing other than God
94 God
in it and it in God . . . In order to understand the thought of Eckhart and to

avoid the facile accusation of immanentism, it is necessary to get rid of every
static representation of the relation of the creature to God . . . Man is not the
Image of God, he is according to the image of God; he is not the Son of God,
but rather his adopted son, and so on.”83 Pure auto-affection was skillfully
transferred from the relation of man to himself (Essence of Manifestation) to
the relation of man to God (I am the Truth and Incarnation), and therefore
suggests in some sense that one enters, without explicitly saying so, within
the scope of the Eckhartian formulations condemned by Pope John XXII in
the bull of March 27, 1329, where 28 articles of Eckhart are stigmatized:
“God made me one with his being and not simply his likeness” (ipse operatur
me suum esse unum non simile) and “The Father engenders me like his Son,
with no distinction” (generat me ipse suum filium sine omni distinctione).84
Identification instead of resemblance (to be according to the image of God
and not God), and generation instead of creation (engendered, not created—a
formula which applies to the Son and not to creatures in the Creed), are two
pitfalls on which Eckhartian thought could run aground if it is not correctly
interpreted. The absence of distinction leads to confusion, as does the refusal
of transcendence for the sake of pure immanence, if the necessary distance
between man and God, as required by Trinitarian theology, does not remain
(which is assured by the conception of the Father as origin (archê).85
(b) Hence the second objection, now purely theological: Does not the iden-
tification of the “ground of the soul” and the “ground of God” lead to the
suppression of all distance between man and God and therefore the sup-
pression of the idea of creation itself? As has already been seen above with
Erigena (chap. 2, and which we will see below with Saint Bonaventure, chap.
6), when man “runs in God” within a Trinitarian monadology, he “runs”
within the collection of created things, as contained within the Word. Eck-
hart’s thought is radicalized here. For him we no longer run only within
the Word, but rather we “are” somehow the Word itself: “Starting from the
very same ground as the one in which the Father births his Speech, Mar-
tha becomes fruitfully co-engendering.”86 There again, the co-engendering of
God by Martha in the encounter with Mary her sister, following therefore the
Lord himself, ought to be well understood. If “all that which is proper to the
divine nature is also completely proper to the just and divine man” (quidquid
proprium est divinae naturae, hoc totum proprium iusto et divino) (condem-
nation 13), one should wonder what is appropriate to man and to God and
what is the responsibility of Martha and what pertains specifically to the
Lord.87 It is hardly a matter here of condemning Eckhart again, but, on the
contrary, only of discerning in his thought what is in danger of being poorly
interpreted. For it is certainly the case that Eckhart’s thought should be reha-
bilitated today. But some total “absolution,” made in a backlash against a
much too totalizing condemnation, ought not be itself hastily made either.
It would be just as false to want to anathematize Eckhart as it would be to
denounce his accusers. Each case requires careful discernment—not in order

to oppose the parties involved, but in order to avoid a dogmatism that seems
to appeal to theology in its lucubration but in reality is secretly fed by the
stream of a dubious philosophy.88
Appropriation. The appropriation of man to God thus responds to the

accusation of the identification of man and God. For what is appropriate
to the fecundity of Martha is rightly understood less in the identification of
properties—which would lead to a total fusion of man and God—than in the
exchange of one’s own. It is precisely here that the collusion of Husserlian
phenomenology and Eckhartian mysticism is broken. The meeting points and
rapprochements of Husserl and Eckhart are indeed often less acknowledged
than the distinctions and oppositions by which they differ. The “rejection
of every intermediary,” even the capacity to engender God starting from a
self which itself is only able to be received from God, is the measure of the
distance which separates a phenomenology that is “egological” such as Hus-
serl’s, and a theology that is “alterological” such as Eckhart’s. It is not a
matter of opposing egocentrism and theocentrism, as if the return to the self
was always paid in return for a purported objectivity about God. From a
Christian perspective the engendering God is only understood starting from
God himself. The radicality of the phenomenological epochê, which in Hus-
serl supposes that God himself ought to be suspended (Ideas I, § 58) in order
to leave to the subject alone the care of engendering all things including God
(Ideas I, § 57), is thus rejoined by another yet more original radicality for
which the engendering of God starting from the self returns, as if after the
fact, to an engendering of the self starting from God: “The Latin word ego,
which signifies ‘I’ pertains to no one for it is appropriate to God alone in his
unity.”89
Otherwise said, in the identification of the “ground of the soul” and the
“ground of God” I do not see myself starting from my own proper ground
[fond]—the ground [le fond] understood here as both that which makes the
abyss of my being as well as the riches on which it draws (as in the expression
“transfer of funds” [transfert de fonds]): “In the soul there is something that
is so visible to God that it is one and not united [un et non uni]. It is one in
that it has nothing in common with anything and holds nothing any longer
in common with anything created.”90 We constitute with God in ourselves
as we are in him a single and same ground insofar as the intentional aim by
which I see myself is or becomes the intentional aim by which he sees me:
“My eye and the eye of God are a single and same eye, a single and same
vision, a single and same knowledge, a single and same love.”91 In this way
Martha becomes “fruitfully co-engendering” as we have seen (“Sermon 2”),92
not in that she draws God only from herself, but on the contrary in that God
is somehow born in her when she is born of him in faith: “God engenders me
as Himself and He engenders himself as me.”93
96 God
The “transfer of what is one’s own”—the identification of the “ground of

the soul” and the “ground of God”—leads, mystically and phenomenologi-
cally speaking, to an “exchange of properties”: “Here I live from that which
is properly mine as God lives from that which is properly His.”94 The essen-
tial for Eckhart as for every Christian is not that I live my life but that I live
his life in living mine, or better, that I enact in mine the best way of living
his: “It is no longer I who live but Christ lives within me” (Gal. 2:20). The
appropriation of the self by the self is, in Christianity, all the more paradoxi-
cal as it never acts by itself but is always won over “by another.” Because I
do not accede to myself (ego) without another than me within me (ego alter),
I articulate myself as another self (alter ego). Here also do I detach myself
from my I, or reduce my ego itself, as I discover myself constituted as an ego
that I would have never engendered: “Without her own attachment, Martha
is always equally near God and herself.”95 Such impropriety paradoxically
makes for the most proximity and the most appropriate self, just as the inca-
pacity to articulate the self paradoxically leads to the affirmation of the self
constituted by another. In seeing myself I do not see only me but I see God
seeing me and giving me the vision of myself. Somehow engendering God
intentionally in me, I observe myself in hindsight as engendered by him, seen
before being seen, constituted before being constituted. God somehow gives
man his own vision of the world—making the vision of man the vision of
God: “If you want God to be your own, make yourself his own and think of
nothing but him.”96
“Oneself as another”—the rupture of Eckhart or Ricoeur with the first
Husserl (apperceptive transposition), though not the second (generativity), is
therefore consummated: “To the ‘as’ I should like to attach a strong meaning,
not only that of a comparison (oneself similar to another) but indeed that of
an implication (oneself inasmuch as being other).”97 No more than phenome-
nology, Christianity today gains from the movement of inverse intentionality,
therefore neither reducing nor suspending “God” or the “other” (Ideas I §
58) in order to constitute the “self” starting from the “I” alone (Ideas I, § 57).
To the contrary, in Christianity, community precedes identity (chap. 7: Ori-
gen), knowledge of the other justifies knowledge of the self (chap. 8: Thomas
Aquinas), and my haecceitas is received from the singularity of God (chap. 9:
Duns Scotus). We will return to this with the conception of “alterity” as the
spearhead of a new phenomenological interrogation of medieval philosophy
in the third part of this work. The generativity of God in me, and starting
from me insofar as I dwell in God, maintains thus “in me” the possibility of
an awareness of God in the world and of creation in general. The experience
of detachment (Abgeschiedenheit), the abandonment or suspension of crea-
tures (epochê), thus constitutes the starting point from which I liberate myself
from creatures in order to give every place to the Creator, and by which a
new vision of the world resurfaces—now through his own vision of it over
me: “The eye in which I see God is the same eye in which God sees me.”98
Generativity
The movement of radicalization which we have chronicled from “relation”
in Augustine (chap. 1) to “phenomenality” in Erigena (chap. 2) thus leads to
the consideration of a kind of birth and genesis of God within the I. Similar
to the movement of the Cartesian Meditations of Husserl, a simple “static
phenomenology” of the welcoming of the phenomenon—or of God inas-
much as he appears to me—does not suffice for Eckhart. To say it again in
phenomenological terms, it would be necessary to pass to the “questions of
universal genesis and the genetic structure of the ego.”99 In the passage from
intention (the reduction of every intermediary according to a mode of the
lived experience of things [work and activity]) to constitution (the genera-
tion of the other starting from my ego which is also constituted by him), the
effect is profound—and, in Eckhart, exemplary. Carrying to term the work
of reduction (and conversion), two traits make the mystical ego in Eckhart
the source of the generativity of God in man: (a) in the active genesis of the
“birth of God in the self”; (b) in the passive genesis of the “recognition of a
pathos of the self in God.”
Active Genesis: The Birth of God in the Self. (a) According to Husserl, active
genesis designates the case when “the Ego functions as productively con-
stitutive, by means of subjective processes that are specifically acts of the
Ego.”100 But generating and constituting (God) starting from one’s own self
as if to confirm here the secrets of the phenomenologist in relation to Rhine-
land mysticism (supra) was, according to Eckhart (modifying, only a little,
the Gospel text), precisely the task assigned to Martha: “Jesus ascended to
a small fortress and was received by a virgin who was a woman.”101 The
transformation of the text, introducing the virginity of Martha where it is
not noted, has no other purpose than accenting a contrario fecundity as a
feminine trait. Not only symbolically “virgin,” that is, capable of detaching
herself from all sensible delight (the opposite of Mary totally absorbed in lis-
tening to the Lord),102 Martha was in fact first termed a woman according to
the letter of the text: “He entered into a village and a woman named Martha
received him into her house” (Lk. 10:38). Against an entire tradition which
sings the praises of virginity at the expense of femininity, Eckhart, teacher of
the Beguines, finds in femininity something greater than virginity: “Woman is
the noblest title of the soul, and is even nobler than virgin. That the human
being receives God into himself is good, and in this receptivity humanity
remains intact. But it is better that God becomes fruitful in him [in the con-
stitution of God by Martha], because the fecundity of the gift is the sole way
of being grateful for it.”103
Therefore it is not sufficient for Martha to receive God in an ego that
resembles God, especially as it abolishes the distance between them. It is also
fitting for her to give birth or engender God starting from the self, to save the
98 God
world through the self. The task of the feminine is thus nicely defined in the
analogy of the carnal and spiritual. As woman, or as what it is insofar as it
is essentially feminine, “the soul gives birth to God starting from itself start-
ing from God in God; it truly gives birth starting from itself; it does this in
order to give birth to God starting from itself.”104 The Socratic method (maïu-
tiké) discovers here its properly Christian meaning: “This fruit and birth of
God himself is specifically that this virgin who is a woman gives birth, and
she bears fruit a hundred times, a thousand times, or even countless times a
day, generating and bearing fruit from the most noble ground . . . ; starting
from there she becomes co-engendering and fruitful.”105 Eckhart responds
to Socrates’s boast in the Theaetetus of a birth “from man and not from
woman” and a giving birth to “souls and not to bodies” by way of the figure
of Martha who gives birth to God himself and not to human beings and gives
birth in herself to a divine flux rather than a soul or a body always separated
from the self in their objectivity.106 The complete identification of egos human
and divine no longer permits saying whether the mother or the child is the
true birth-giver. Martha gives birth to God in herself insofar as God gives
birth to himself there, as the way in which man participates in God’s action
of “entering the world [mise au monde].” In an unjustly condemned proposi-
tion (if properly understood), Eckhart dares to affirm: “Man is the generator
of the eternal Word of God [generator Verbi aeterni] and God cannot do
anything [nescuret quidquam facere] without such a man.”107 The genesis
appears here all the more “active” as the generated (God himself) contributes
fully to the activity of the generator (Martha, at once virgin and woman)—
who becomes progressively one with him. Such is the “one thing necessary”
required by the Lord in the story of Martha and Mary: “God absolute must
become me and I must become God.”108
Passive Genesis: The Pathos of the Self in God. (b) But the active genesis of
the human ego that engenders God does not yet bring to full term the work
of reduction. In the same way that, for Husserl “anything built by activity
[active genesis] necessarily presupposes, as the lowest level, a passivity that
gives something beforehand [passive genesis],”109 so also for Eckhart, all
“theogenesis” is necessarily rooted in a “theopathy”: “I affirm that there was
never anything nobler than to suffer God.”110 Not only in fact (and in order
to return to the figure of Martha in a new way), Jesus enters into this “little
fortress” of the soul by going to Bethany (the reduction to the pure I); not only
was he welcomed by one who was not just a “virgin” but also a “woman”
in order to engender her (active genesis); but still he “was received” by her
to the degree that he was discovered, in Martha and by Martha, as already
there or as given within her, suffering God (passive genesis).111 The novitiate
of Mary—to which her sister invited her to enter quasi-phenomenologically,
in the mode of the reduction (being absorbed, then, neither into things nor
into God considered in the mode of a thing), does not exempt Martha from a
certain work of conversion herself. The all too beautiful share given to Martha
in her “reduction” that was already effected (Abgeschiedenheit) would prevent
her from seeing how a work of “constitution” is now also to be accomplished
in the act of the birth of God within the self (the co-engendering woman).
Martha still retains indeed a suffering or a pathos as well as the prohibi-
tion of being free from herself in order to be free only to suffer God: this
comes precisely from seeing her sister rest in the “sensible delight” of hearing
the Lord without passing beyond or being detached from him. Affected too
much by her benevolence, Martha fails to be separated from this affection
for her sister and to let God alone take care of her. This “suffering” in fact
remains for Martha a suffering of man—not of God. Here comes the force
of her invective aimed at Jesus to correct her sister: “Tell her to help me!”
(Lk. 10:40)—a formula, as I have already said, which does not indicate that
she suffers from her own labor in her concerned relation to the world (in the
many tasks of service), but only that she suffers the non-detachment of her
sister to the Lord as thing, and now even from her own preoccupied relation
to her sister from which she cannot liberate herself. Detached from the Lord,
Martha is not yet detached from Mary. The natural attitude of her sister—to
speak phenomenologically again—punches its weight, as it were, even if this
is yet the affair of God and not of men. Eckhart thus asks in his sermon on
Martha and Mary (“Sermon 2”): “Do you truly want to know if your suf-
fering is your own or God’s? You ought to find out in this way: you suffer as
a result of your own will, in whatever way, when your suffering causes evil
for you and is heavy to bear. But you suffer for God’s sake and God alone,
when your suffering does not cause evil and is not heavy to bear, because
God bears the burden.”112 The pathein of the suffering that Martha experi-
enced concerning her sister is here, according to Eckhart, neither heroism nor
masochism, nor even expiation. It simply and completely consists in being
detached from suffering itself, to give it to another in order that this suffering
of mine, to which I so often cling and which sticks to me, would thus become
his suffering—the suffering of God and of God alone who tears me from it
and delivers me. The suffering of Martha, undergone in a passivity that she
could not control (in relation to Mary), is thus doubled in a second passivity
(in relation to the Lord). This suffering is more radical in accepting, precisely,
the loss of control, or in other words recognizing that God alone suffers her
suffering more than she could ever suffer and ever will suffer: “God suffers
with man, indeed, he suffers in his fashion before, and far more than that
man who suffers for his sake.”113
Far from all moralizing considerations and far from renewing all my adher-
ences to myself, the act of suffering reveals the very truth of my being in the
authenticity of its relation to God: first exhibiting “my resistance to letting
God be born in me”; then signifying “my consent to mourn the former man
in order to assume the new man”; and finally facilitating “the work of God
within me to detach me from the inessential adherences of my existence.”114
100 God
Well before Emmanuel Levinas, and in a language at once surprisingly mod-

ern and going against all the expiatory theologies already so developed in
the fourteenth century, “suffering” (like “mourning”) in Eckhart is therefore
interpreted as an “experience of the passivity of the subject who until then
has been active”; perhaps as the “impossibility of retreat” which renders man
“forced into life and being.”115 From here comes the ultimate teaching of Eck-
hart concerning Martha, in whom precisely Jesus “was received”: “What man
suffers by God and for God alone, God renders it for him light and sweet.”116
To Give Birth to God Himself. “Why did God become man?” Eckhart asks
by way of a conclusion. The response, for only the time being, is lapidary:
neither for the satisfaction of the Father (Anselm) nor for the reparation of
our faults by the Son (Aquinas), nor even for the manifestation of the Word
(Scotus), but rather, “in order that I may give birth to God himself.”117 The
Christian’s dying to the world or his detachment leads to the birth of God
within him, that is, his appropriate attachment: “O my soul, go out! God
enters!”118 Such is the distinct thing from the song “Granum Sinapis” (“The
Mustard Seed”) that this route—from the reduction to the I to the consti-
tution of God in me—has thus wanted to effect by means of the figure of
Martha of Bethany. But for Eckhart the exit of God identically designated
his entrance into the self, in such a way that in me and of me (in an ulti-
mate fashion) nothing remains, except God: “Absolutely nothing [nihtes niht
(high German)] is able to divert the saint from God.”119 Martha is not the
end, then, in the radicalization of the experience of conversion as a mode of
reduction: there is Paul on the road to Damascus. “When Paul rose from the
ground, he opened his eyes, and saw nothing [Acts 9:8], and this nothing was
God, because when he saw God, he called him nothing [niht/Nichts].”120 The
experience of the nihilization of Saul as a paradoxical vision of nothing (“he
saw nothing”; see Sermons 71 and 52) legitimately carries forward the lived
experience of the reduction rendered visible by Martha (Sermons 86 and 2).
Eckhart makes reference to this precisely in the midst of commenting on the
story of Martha and Mary: “Saint Paul saw God without intermediary when
he was caught up to the third heaven, and the language of the angels was for
him far too great.”121
Partly reducing to the reduction itself, Eckhart almost abolishes egoity,
confounding the reduction with the most complete nihilation. A new debate
is opened here, no longer with the father of phenomenology and the proper
mode of reduction (Husserl), but with the collection of his followers who—
from Heidegger, Fink, and Patocka, to Levinas, Henry, and Marion—deny
the primacy of the ego and begin starting from the question of nihilation.
Could we go all the way with “reducing the reduction” and “converting the
converted”? Such is the question that the radicalization of the experience of
God in himself, running from Saint Augustine (chap. 1) to Erigena (chap.
2) and Eckhart (chap. 3), must carry to full term—in a movement to bring
closure on the question of “God” (part I), but which his own opening to the
“flesh” (part 2) and to the “other” (part 3) would never shut down.
The Reduction to Nothing: The Vision of Paul. With Meister Eckhart a “new
nobility” or “honor of emptiness” is born.122 This is undeniable. In order
to examine the question of nihilation after what we have seen in Eckhart,
we must take a passing look at the debate maintained with Eckhart in the
works of Heidegger. In the beginning of this chapter I noted that the second
much more famous debate between the philosopher from Fribourg and the
Dominican from Thuringia will spare us from retracing it here in too much
detail. It suffices to bring to light its main contours in order to indicate the
point(s) where interpretations differ. In his long career, there are five key
places where Heidegger refers to Eckhart: (1) in his Habilitationsschrift, the
Treatise on the Categories and Signification in Duns Scotus (1915), (2) in the
epigraph of his The Concept of Time in the Science of History (1915), (3) in
his course on the Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism (1918–
19), (4) in the Letter on Humanism, at least implicitly under the lemma of
the Deity (1946), and (5) in the famous discourse given in honor of Con-
radin Kreuser (“Memorial Address for Conradin Kreuser”), published in the
collection Gelassenheit (1955). The point is clear: Meister Eckhart was the
critical companion of Heidegger throughout his career.123
A question imposes itself here, which has not ceased to hold the atten-
tion of phenomenological commentators, and which should be of concern
to medievalists as well. A key passage from the text which “can serve as a
commentary on Gelassenheit” (interview from 1944–45) in fact challenges
the claim of a pure filiation of Gelassenheit or “Heideggerian serenity” from
the gelâzenheit or “letting be” of Eckhart: “Even serenity can be thought of
still within the domain of the will, as happens with the old masters of thought
such as Meister Eckhart,” whereas “what we are calling serenity evidently
does not mean the casting-off of sinful selfishness and the letting-go of self-
w
ill in favor of the divine will.”124 It could not be clearer: Eckhart’s gelâzenheit
remains a prisoner, according to Heidegger (and probably a result of a pietistic
interpretation of Eckhart à la Fenelon, Madame Guyon, Oetinger, etc.), to a
voluntarist mysticism of abandonment where everything can and ought to be
abandoned except the act of abandonment itself, which always remains “inte-
rior to the will.” But as Jean Greisch has rightly emphasized in relation to this
passage, “the recognized debt to speculative mysticism [Eckhart in particular]
is accompanied in Heidegger by a strange misreading.”125 It is more likely
the case that Eckhart goes farther than Heidegger himself in this movement
of complete “abandonment”: not only in that he is detached from the will,
even to the point of his integration into God—contrary to what Heidegger
suggests, but also because he “undoes” the gelâzenheit as such from every
“attitude in regard to things,” which Heidegger’s “serenity” or “Gelassenheit”
does not “accomplish” inasmuch as it is always bound up with the Geviert
102 God
or the four dimensions of the sacred (earth, sky, divinities, and mortals).126
If, in order to “let be” it is necessary not only to leave things and oneself,
but even to let go of the very act of letting go, it seems Eckhart has radical-
ized what Heidegger always retains. Heidegger, in short, remains too attached
to the thing-dimension in the category of the sacred, thereby failing truly
to liberate the self in a complete nihilation. To disclose—now speaking as a
medievalist—how the “nothing” of Eckhart is therefore “nothing,” not even
the “nothing of something,” nor of the “self as thing,” is thus to show that in
terms of the reduction proposed to Mary and of the constitution enacted by
Martha (Sermons 2 and 86) there is deciphered also a complete radicalization
operated by Paul (Sermons 52 and 71) whereby precisely “he who speaks of
God through nothing, speaks of God in the appropriate way.”127
The Reduction to Nothing

Radicalized Nothing. Surrexit autem Paulus de terra apertisque oculis nihil
videbat: “Paul rose from the ground and although his eyes were opened he
saw nothing” (Acts 9:8). In a similar way to his reversal of the interpretation
of the episode of Martha and Mary (Sermons 2 and 86), Eckhart ingeniously
reveals anew here what neither reader nor hearer could anticipate (“Sermon
71”). Seeing nothing is ordinarily “absence of vision,” and the blindness with
which man is affected is either by lack of light (obscurity) or by its excess
(dazzling brightness). But Eckhart understands the absence of vision in the
figure of Paul as the vision of the Absent: “He saw nothing, which is God.”128
The “nothing” no longer designates the impossibility of seeing things, but
rather the possibility of seeing otherwise: whoever embraces the nothing that
is God himself sees through God the nothing of God. Here Eckhart radical-
izes even further the nihilation discovered by Erigena in his break from the
apophaticism of Denys (chap. 2). Here, where Erigena posed negation not
only as beyond all position, whether affirmative or negative (as in Denys),
but as the non-position of position itself, Eckhart penetrates into the heart
of this very non-position: to be “open-eyed” and at the same time to “see the
nothing” that is God himself.
Not seeing anything is not the same as seeing nothing. To be “open-eyed”
in the radiance of a light is meant to indicate a “that” which is to be seen by
negation of all things seen, or better, of all that is seen only in the modality
of the thing: “When he sees all things as nothing, then Paul sees God.”129 The
vision of the whole of God presupposes therefore the vision of the nothing
of being. But nothing ensures that the anything is not some inverse of noth-
ing, as if it would do to overcome a simple dialectical opposition. In the same
way that the “nothing” of Heideggerian anxiety (das Nichts) is at once “the
integral negation of the totality of being” and “brings Dasein for the first time
before beings as such,”130 so does the vision of things as nothing in Eckhart
manifest God as the unique place of the reception of being in general, without,
however, being reduced to some sort of entity (the term “black-entity” [neg-
e ntité] is derived here, which is sometimes attributed to Eckhart).131
The “small word nothing” (Nichts) used by Luke in the vision of Saul
(Acts 9:8), contains four meanings according to Eckhart, of which the expli-
cation reveals the definitive way the “reduction” is a pure operation—from
God and by God alone. The explicit exposition of these four steps unfolds the
different moments of the reduction to nothing in Eckhart that are not pres-
ent in the angst of Heidegger. (a) The first is synthesized already in Eckhart:
when he rose up from the ground, he opened his eyes and saw nothing and
this nothing was God, because when he saw God, he called it nothing. (b) The
other meaning: when he rose up he saw nothing but God. (c) The third: in all
things he only saw God. (d) The fourth: when he saw God, he saw all things
as nothing.132 We will now see that these steps unfold the process that moves
from having “nothing to do” [rien à voir] with things (the two first negative
steps relative to creatures) to “seeing the nothing” [voir le rien] of God (the
two last positive steps in regard to the Creator).
Seeing God and Only God. (a) The first meaning: “Paul saw nothing, and this
was God.”133 This first milestone is sufficient in itself to indicate a radicality
that Heidegger did not seem to notice. Certainly Eckhart makes God being’s
nothingness [néant d’étant] and probably reaches here a mode of being of
Dasein which is neither “ready-to-hand” nor “present-at-hand,” neither
“available” nor “subsistent”: “If you see something or if something falls into
your knowledge,” says Eckhart in “Sermon 71,” “it is not God, for the main
reason that he is neither this nor that.”134 But regarding this nothingness of
being (“neither this nor that”) the Dominican originally extends the concept
to a planar negation [néant de plan] as well (“neither here nor there”): “The
one who says that God is here or there, do not believe him.”135 Saint Paul on
the way to Damascus, like the fiancée in the Song of Songs, designates God,
not only as a determined object, but also according to a fixed place—in order
better to persecute him: “The fiancée [or St. Paul] seeks for him on her couch;
she means by that, for the one who is attached to or suspended from a thing
that is below God, her couch is too small. Everything that God can create
is too small.”136 In his soul, Saint Paul “sees nothing” because he lacks the
power of vision capable of seeing. Totally oriented within a space where God
is not—as something or some being “to persecute”—the “nothing” of vision
first designates the space of a “presence” of a being of which the absence
risks not being supported, and the objectivity or presentification constitutes
it precisely as an idol. It is no longer sufficient, according to Eckhart, to say,
“God is not something because he does not know what he is” (Erigena). Eck-
hart takes away from God himself every place where he could yet be a thing,
knowing that the very thought of a space for a non-thing is still something:
“God is a nothingness and God is a something. What is something is also
a nothing.”137
104 God
(b) Second meaning: the moment of recognizing that “seeing nothing” for
Saint Paul is not only “seeing God as the nothing of things and the place
of things” but seeing “nothing but God.” Paradoxically, seeing “nothing but
God” for Eckhart does not exclude creatures outside of the Creator, but
instead reveals that it is “in God” where all creatures are nothing.138 The
difficulty is not about incorporating creatures into God or into the Word,
as in Bonaventure’s monadology (chap. 6), but rather about showing that
it is precisely as they are in God that they are nothing. It is evident here
that creatures are not something more by being held outside of God—which,
properly speaking, defines sin—but it means that the totality of God brings
to nothing any remainder of creatureliness outside of God. One can give both
a dialectical and phenomenological interpretation here. It could be held, cer-
tainly, for Paul, that seeing “any particular thing is to place oneself outside of
the whole” and that it would be necessary to reach a state of apprehending
God “as all in all.” The nothing of creatures will thus be identical to the “all
of God,” in a dialectical assumption supposedly sufficient to assume them
(P.-J. Labarrière).139 But there is also a phenomenological way to envision
this relation of nothing to the whole. Creatures are “nothing in God” not
merely because they are assumed in him. Rather, the exteriority reconciled
into a new divine interiority leaves God and creatures in a process of opposi-
tion and then unity which already supposes a thought shaped by exteriority,
the poles overtaken and assumed into a new totality. In Eckhart this works
for the meaning rather than the structure. Creatures are “nothing in God”
because in him they are struck by vanity. Like Heidegger’s “profound bore-
dom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling
fog, removing all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable
indifference,” the “nothing but God” that Paul perceives here signifies, as he
later writes in Romans, that “the entire creation has been subject to vanity”
(Rom. 8:20).140 Said otherwise, the “nothing but God,” like the “nothing in
God” of creatures in the Creator is not only able to be read in terms of inter-
penetration but discloses what it is in the sense of revelation. If, according
to a natural attitude, creatures are something in themselves, as we have seen
in Mary of Bethany, they are “nothing” not only according to the mode of
reduction operated by Martha who sees with God deep down, but even in
Paul’s eyes, which consist precisely in “seeing nothing” apart from the vanity
of all things, which would be a seeing everything relative to Him who is vis-
ibility itself in his shining forth: God as “nothing but God.”
The two first determinations of “nothing” in Eckhart (nichts) are thus
negative in the sense that they are always related either to creatures or to cre-
ated space in order then to be detached from them: the first (“seeing God”)
rightly refuses to reduce God to a thing (“neither this nor that”) and even to
extension or the very idea of a reified space (“neither here nor there”). The
second (“seeing nothing but God”) strikes the totality of creatures with van-
ity (a phenomenological reading), rather than reconciling in its totality the
separated parts of creation (dialectical interpretation). But God was not satis-
fied with this “nothing at all”—that is, the act of being differentiated from
things. This is self-evident. Eckhart goes farther by pulling out its positivity.
By seeing “nothing but God in all things” and “all things as a nothing,” God
himself is positively seen in his nothingness.
Nothing Appropriated. (c) “The nothing was God”: the formula rises up for
us in all its clarity, independently of creatures since it is now a matter of pen-
etrating into the nothingness of the Creator.141 We will not see, or rather we
will see the nothing of that which is above the mode of beings (creatures) in
seeing God as non-being, but we will reach to the Nothingness as the name
that is now the most appropriate for the divine itself: “If God is neither good-
ness, nor being, nor truth, nor One,” Eckhart asks in “Sermon 23,” “then
what is he? He is Nothingness, neither this nor that.”142 Being nothingness for
God means “being the nothing of nothing”143—in other words not only the
nothing of the totality of being and its modes, but also the nothing of being
which would designate it even as “being” a nothingness (“he is Nothing-
ness”). Seemingly commenting on Eckhart, Heidegger states: “Because beings
as a whole slip away, so that just the nothing crowds round, in the face of
anxiety all utterance of the ‘is’ falls silent.”144 In this third step God is given
in action rather than by speaking, by the articulations of language that neces-
sarily predicates God in terms of being or non-being. The image of light alone
properly characterizes God here, in which Paul, on his way to Damascus, is
“enveloped” as the light “falls from heaven” (Acts 9:3). We cannot say that
God “is the light,” as I have already emphasized, because of the opposite risk
of defining him still “as a being or as a good,” for by that “we still know noth-
ing of him.” But we will nevertheless simply indicate that “the light which is
God flows from beyond.” If the light is not but makes visible all things by not
being among the things that it illumines, then Paul sees “God in this light and
nothing else.”145 Everything occurs in this third level as if it were given to the
Apostle to the Gentiles to see the light that we never see, since we only see the
things illumined by it. Such a reading is justified by the following: “His trav-
eling companions were struck dumb: they heard the voice but saw no one”
(Acts. 9:7). This implies that they certainly heard something but were never-
theless not struck by that which struck Saul alone—that exceptional gift to
men of “seeing God,” seeing “God as nothing.” Passing from not seeing any-
thing to seeing the nothing, Paul has reached the state of supreme detachment
(Abgeschiedenheit), which sometimes appears “at the point closest to nothing
that anything that is not God alone would be able to dwell in detachment.”146
(d) The last stage: “When Paul saw God, he saw everything as nothing.” It
is necessary to go a little further here—like the fiancée in the Song of Songs:
“going a little further she finally found the one whom her soul loves.”147 In this
stretching of creaturely being is found the greatest proximity to the Creator.
Here “detachment” is truly radical. One must return to the source and belong
106 God
to the source itself. Here the paradigm of climbing from the creature to the
Creator is manifest in the discussion of “color.” The eye ought not “to contain
any color” in order to see “every color,” much like the luminous prism which,
being without color, confers all the colors of the spectrum. Turning one’s
gaze from “things” to the “nothing of nothing” that is, God himself, Saint
Paul reaches the focal point “where the light first breaks in.”148 But regard-
ing this “even further” of the Song of Songs, already very far indeed, it is still
necessary for Paul to go “yet even further,” according to Eckhart, proof, as
it were, that “conversion” in the theological sense does not happen without
a radical “reduction” in the phenomenological sense. The Dominican adds
with an unattainable radicalism: “When even I would reach the light at the
very point of its irruption, it would be necessary for me to be completely
laid bare by this irruption itself.”149 In Eckhart one does not simply return
to the source, as in the exitus-reditus schematic that informs all the theo-
logical summas since Erigena’s Periphyseon, for in Eckhart one is unmade by
the source itself. The God who is reached here is a God “without mode,” a
“mode without a mode,” or a “being without being,” because “he possesses
no modality.”150 Certainly, Bernard of Clairvaux, explicitly mentioned here,
has defined the “measure of the love of God as a love without measure.”
But the exact formula of De diligendo Deo should be understood, in my
opinion, according to a qualitative mode despite the customary quantitative
interpretation. Modus diligendi Deum, sine modo diligere—“the mode of
loving God is to love him without a mode.” This must be interpreted and
translated, yet not in the following typical way: “The measure of the love of
the love of God is to love him without measure.” With respect to the manner
of the reception of God, the quantitative excess should give way here to a
new qualitative modality. Seeing, with Saint Paul, “the divine nothingness”
as seeing nothing is no longer being with nothing to see, but rather with
seeing everything, not according to a dialectical power of “over-sumption”
[sur-somption], but according to a phenomenological capacity of “manifesta-
tion.” Eckhart concludes: “We must approach God in a way without a way
and as being without being because he possesses no modality. This is why St.
Bernard says that the one who wants to know you, God, must measure you
without measure.”151
At this point we could consider the broader path to be traveled and there-
fore conclude that from the discovery of relation (chap. 1: Augustine) to
theophany as negation of every objective quid (chap. 2: Erigena), and then
to nihilation as suspension of all modality (chap. 3: Eckhart), it would be
impossible to attain any greater degree of radicality. Yet such would be a
misunderstanding of Eckhart. We should not yet entertain the suspicion of
having finished the work begun. The reduction to nothing does not work, in
fact, without reduction to the nothing, and therefore from an I itself capable
of posing it. It does not yet suffice to define God as a “mode of love with-
out mode” for such still requires that the subject itself be deprived of all its
modalities or faculties by which it would still be able to pose God as a mode.

As I said above, Eckhart completed the step that Husserl always refused to
make, thus anticipating here all the philosophies that turn on the deconstruc-
tion of the ego (Levinas, Marion, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Derrida . . .). We
do “not have the right to bracket the residue of the pure I” (Ideas I, §57),
said Husserl. But this is precisely what Eckhart negates, according to a mode
of “mystical conversion” that is even more radical than all the “phenomeno-
logical reductions”—which means that contemporary philosophers will learn
what truly concerns philosophy by reading theology.
Reduction of the I
In the act of “bracketing” (epochê), nothing remains in Eckhart but the brack-
ets themselves: “Everything that ever came from God is ordered to a pure
operation . . . Thus it is dispossessed to the point of not knowing anything
but God working within it.”152 Passing here from “Sermon 71” (“When Paul
rose from the ground, he opened his eyes, and saw nothing.”) to “Sermon
52” (“Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”), the
question is no longer merely about God himself appearing in his light (Saint
Paul), but concerns instead the capacity of man to become detached from this
light in order to enter into “true poverty” (“Commentary on the First Beati-
tude”). Here arises the ontological meaning of the poverty internal to the
subject: “A poor man is the one who wants nothing and knows nothing and
has nothing.” Not “wanting,” not “knowing,” and not “having”: such are the
traits that in an ultimate way reduce the I itself in its pretended capacity to
receive the light of God.
To Want Nothing. We would wrongly interpret Eckhart’s “not-wanting” of

the I if we considered it some kind of asthenia or apathy. This would be a
result of not understanding the properly ontological perspective (as opposed
to an ethical one) in Eckhart’s thought. The phrase “blessed are the poor in
spirit” (Mt. 5:3) in fact first designates the poverty of the “heart” or rather,
of the will itself in its desire “to accomplish the very precious will of God.”153
Certainly, the desire to offer oneself to God, and God alone, always remains
laudable. One can “see nothing” in order to “see nothing but God,” and like
Saint Paul to seem to have already arrived. Eckhart, however, insists that
there is more. For, “as long as a man retains his will in wanting to accomplish
the very precious will of God, he does not yet have the poverty of which I
want to speak.”154 Said otherwise, I do not want to unite myself to God—
even with the best possible intentions. Further, even God himself does not
incorporate me with himself by virtue of any desire that is his own. In both
cases—the human desire for union with God and the divine desire for the
same—it is a matter of two wills standing over-against each other: the human
“will that desires,” on the one side, and the divine “desire to receive,” on the
108 God
other. Those who talk this way, says Eckhart, preaching to some Beguines
who would certainly be hard of hearing, “they are jackasses”: they think that
“man should live in such a way that he never accomplishes his will in any-
thing” or even that “man ought to attempt to accomplish the very precious
will of God.”155 Again, in both cases, renouncing oneself and union with God,
it is always a matter of the self, either refusing its desire for things or being
absorbed into the desire of God. There is no question however in Eckhart of
wanting to adhere to the will of God and not being tied to one’s own will.
The yes and the no of the will do not yet suspend the will itself. On the con-
trary, and steadfastly against all the Nietzschean forms of nihilism to come, it
is the “desire for desire” that is in question here. One is “poor” who “wants
nothing” and “desires nothing” in the sense that this “nothing” is that of the
will itself, the desire to be attached necessarily to that which it desires: “As
long as you have the will to accomplish the will of God and desire the eternity
of God, you are not poor.”156 Therefore the will itself in its desire to be united
with God is here reduced—for it is by this very desire itself that it always
remains something, at the very least the wish to be someone or something in
its union with God.
Let us recall here what I mentioned above. In his Commentary on Seren-
ity, Heidegger did not hold back from castigating the Galâzenheit of Eckhart
“conceived as interior to the will” in opposition to his own Gelassenheit
which is clearly “something other than the rejection of the culpable egoism
or the abandonment of one’s own will to the divine will.” The “misreading,”
already indicated by reference to Jean Greisch above borders on a “misinter-
pretation.” A detailed reading of “Sermon 52” shows the opposite, namely,
that true poverty, in the ontological sense, is not “interior to the will” and it
ought to be detached from this “abandonment of one’s own will to the will
of God”: “Man ought to have true poverty, he ought also to be deprived
of his created will.”157 Dare I suggest, despite its provocativeness, that on
this point there are not, among phenomenologists, even some “jackasses who
understand nothing of the divine truth,” if the role of the jackass is not to
understand the necessity of “being detached from oneself”?158 Whatever the
diagnosis, and to say it in a less severe way, we should recognize that such a
truth is not easy to understand, for theology as much as philosophy. Meister
Eckhart has warned us twice in this sermon, for those who want to hear: “If
you don’t want to measure up to this truth about which I now want to speak,
you cannot understand me.”159
To Know Nothing. In such a radical excess, it is not sufficient to desire noth-

ing, at least in order to realize “conversion” as an act achieved by “reduction.”
The reduction of the pure I requires in fact that the “I itself” ignore its own
suspension, bearing the opposite risk of putting everything in parentheses,
except itself in the very act of imposing them. As I have already mentioned,
Eckhart the Christian is never so separated from Husserl the phenomenologist
and a whole region of contemporary philosophy as when he critiques and

rejects every position of egoity overlooking the divinity. If an “irreducible
residue” would still remain after the “elimination” [mise hors circuit], it is on
the side of the “transcendence of God” (Ideas I, §58) rather than on the “pure
I” (Ideas I, §57) that resistance to the hegemony of the suspension should be
sought. For any “abiding” for man, in the Christian regime at least, has no
meaning outside of God himself in whom one is held, no more than “action”
is able to be understood independently of the proper action of God. Let us
only recall the formula relayed above: “The Latin word ‘ego,’ which means ‘I,’
pertains to no one, it is appropriate for God alone in his unity.”160
Well before Nicholas of Cusa, the “unknowing” of the self already reaches
its height in Eckhart. (i) The first point on this way of “learned ignorance”:
we do not definitively depart, here, from all primacy of the intellect over the
affect, just like, inversely, that of desire over knowledge: “The beatitude of
poverty consists neither in knowledge nor in love.”161 Dominicans (emphasiz-
ing the primacy of the intellect) and Franciscans (emphasizing the primacy of
the affect) seem, in fact, to be reconciled in Eckhart, while they are surpassed.
The divergence—concerning which I will show the importance relative to
the word and the flesh [chap. 6: Bonaventure]—is rooted in a radical pov-
erty of which the mendicancy creates the mode of being of their community
(mendicant brothers). (ii) Second point: “to know that we live,” for Eckhart,
is not life, in the same way that “experiencing that one experiences” is not
experience, or “knowing that one knows” is not truly the “springing forth
of knowledge” [co-(n)naître]. What is envisaged here is not knowledge itself,
but the act of “reflection” by means of which all knowledge of the self is
immediately put at a distance and thereby objectified. Sin alone reflects man
as in a mirror, where necessarily, he is deformed. This primal origin in pure
immediacy, named auto-affection by Michel Henry (rooting it precisely in
Eckhart), is that which man today must rediscover in order to constitute a
new unity with God: “When man is held in the eternal disposition of God,
another does not live there; what lives there is himself.”162 (iii) Third point:
The blessed poverty of the self in its “learned ignorance” does not know any-
thing, either of the destiny of life (its own or God’s) or of that which makes
it live (God himself), or even of the very mode by which it lives (knowledge):
“The poor man knows nothing . . . He ought to live in such a way that he
does not know anything about what he lives for, neither for himself, nor for
the truth, nor for God; further, he ought to be so deprived of all knowledge
that he knows neither by knowledge nor experience that God lives in him;
further, he ought to be deprived of all knowledge that lives within him.”163
One cannot be any more radical. In this triple reduction—of the aim, the
object, and the mode of knowledge itself—is found the most complete sus-
pension. Knowledge itself ought to free itself from its act of knowledge just as
the will, as mentioned above, ought to be freed from its act of will. The Abge-
schiedenheit here attains its apogee, the nihilation of the faculties, which,
110 God
already before Eckhart in Hadewijch Antwerp, makes the “nothing of the

soul” the transcendental condition of any access to the all of God: “When the
soul has nothing else but God,” says the woman troubadour of God, unveil-
ing the beginnings of the Gêlazenheit of Eckhart, “it is engulfed in him, and
is brought to naught—then [Christ] is exalted above the earth, and then he
draws all to him.”164
What remains, then, if we truly penetrate into this radical “nothing of noth-
ing,” not of God alone (Saint Paul on the Damascus road) but also of the
soul itself (Blessed are the poor . . .)? Precisely nothing—except the operation
or act of reduction which ignores itself: “All that ever comes from God is
ordained to a pure operation . . . Further, we say that man ought to remain
aloof and detached in such a way that he neither knows nor comprehends
that God works in him.”165 “Detachment” is not in Eckhart a pure abstrac-
tion at all. It is not a matter of getting rid of all in order to enter into a pure
indifference regarding creatures or the world. One “remains detached” when
and only when he is attached to the operation and not to that which receives
the operation nor to the operator. As I already indicated, God is a flux and
not a thing. The poor in spirit know nothing, to the degree, as Eckhart says,
that “there is something in the soul out of which flows knowledge and love,”
but which is neither knowledge nor love itself.166 Knowledge arrests the flux
and stops the operation, only in that it knows it in the moment of its origi-
nal flowing forth and stands to immobilize it, whereas the divine flow itself
has not ceased flowing. The only learned ignorance is that of an “unknowing
knowledge”—of God himself in his activity, of the creature in its reception,
and of the subject in its subsistence: “It is necessary that the one who wants to
be poor in spirit be poor in relation to all his own knowing, in such a way that
he knows nothing, neither God, nor the creature, nor himself.”167 Only “con-
version” or “reduction” paradoxically remains as an act of pure suspension,
independently of God conceived as “final” (Ideas I §58), certainly, but also of
the “pure I” (Ideas I §57). Eckhart’s path toward God advocates in advance,
as it were, Husserl’s conception of time, albeit in a more direct way—perhaps
because better inspired. This way reduces every way to the point of the irre-
ducibility of the I itself (Ideas I) in order to enter into a flux which constitutes
it in a more original way (Husserl’s Lectures on Internal Time Consciousness).
“[Time] has the absolute properties of something to be metaphorically desig-
nated as a ‘flow,’ ” emphasizes Husserl in a way strangely close to Eckhart, “of
something that originates in a point of actuality, in a source-point, ‘the now,’
and so on. In the actuality-experience we have the primal source-point and
a continuity of moments of reverberation. For all of this, we lack names.”168
To Have Nothing. In order to bring to term the detachment of the self,

Eckhart adds the “third poverty,” which is “the last poverty . . . that man
has nothing.”169 Here we reach the height of radicality. Yet we would have
thought the opposite, that the “poverty of having” would be only the first
degree of poverty, following the temptations which climb progressively from

having to power and from power to honor (Mt. 4:1–11). But here detachment
is located in the interior renunciation of having all given and even of a space
for giving because “having nothing” is here not even having “a proper place
where God would be able to operate.”170 Said otherwise, if God is “ordained
to pure action” (supra), then I am not even myself a place of his operation,
for this would be to attribute to me too much, namely, that of being a place
for welcoming him. Does this mean that God operates “nowhere,” in the no
man’s land171 of an activity that no longer knows to which saint it turns? Far
from it, at least in Eckhart. For if God does not operate in man at the risk
of new attachments, he introduces man into himself in order for man to be
left totally affected by him: “God is himself the place in which he wants to
operate . . . and man is thus the one in whom God suffers and God is the
place of his own work such that God is the one who works in himself.”172
For Eckhart, all false riches contrary to true poverty come from difference,
which is always a manner of existing by the self where one does not want to
be totally auto-affected by the other. To guard difference is to keep existence.
But true abandonment is to be detached from everything, including God as
the one who ought to be received and the self as the way by which one exists:
“We say therefore that man ought to be so poor that he is and has no place
where God would be able to operate. Where man guards a place, he main-
tains a difference.”173
Let us repeat the question anew: what is left in this act of “conversion”
as radical operation of the “reduction”? Nothing— but nothing as God
himself who is, or rather, flows as the act of reduction or conversion itself.
Our prayer becomes here that “God himself detach us from God,” in the
conviction that the “operation” itself— what I have termed elsewhere a
“metamorphosis”—is his better attribution.174 The “flux” here becomes the
“breakthrough,” more “noble” in the opening and the irruption of man in
God (breakthrough) than the flowing of God himself to the final ground of
the soul of man (flux). Indeed, the language of flow must be exceeded here
because it is still a manner of marking a difference and therefore of exterior-
izing. The “breakthrough” is the true operation of God and through God for
the man who is held in him and therefore acts at one with him. The spark
of the soul is the upsurge of God himself in man acting at One with him, in
whom the phenomenological epochê translated into the terms of Christian
conversion reveals the remarkable possibility of reducing the pure I, which
will renounce all its own egoity and every autarchy of the subject. Hence
Eckhart concludes his great sermon on poverty: “A great master says that his
breakthrough is nobler than his flowing, and it is true. When I flow in God all
things speak: God is. But this would not render me blessed because in this I
recognize that I am a creature. Further, then: in the breakthrough where I am
deprived of my own will and the will of God and all his works and even God
himself, I am above all creatures and am neither God nor creature any more.
112 God
I am what I was and what I ought now to remain forever . . . because in this
breakthrough I see that I and God are One.”175
We would be right to wonder about this absence of difference from the
perspective of philosophy as much as theology. Does not the unity of creature
and Creator destroy the act of creation itself, reduced to a single engendering?
Better, does the position of the Deity beyond the Trinity not render Christian-
ity anonymous, relegated to a “divine energy” that cannot be truly, that is,
Christianly, avowed? The questions posed here to Eckhart are those we have
elsewhere wanted to pose to Michel Henry. Let us not revisit this any further,
insomuch as the negative critique moves us away from the positive forward
motion of “description”—the method elected for the present work (see the
“Introduction”).176 Let us simply restate, then, the path we have taken: from
Mary of Bethany to Martha we have learned the reduction as interiorization
of God in the self (Sermons 2 and 86); from Martha to Saint Paul we have
been taught the suspension as entrance into the “nothing of the nothing of
God” (“Sermon 71”); and with the “poor in spirit” (“Sermon 52”) we have
entered into detachment from all, and understood ourselves as the place for
the reception of God, revealing him to be, in an ultimate fashion, “pure oper-
ation” in the act of his primal “breakthrough,” which was in the last analysis
beyond his simple “flowing.”
What could appear here as a simple affair of words for Eckhart is actually a
matter of an attitude, even a manner of being properly human, and therefore
also divine by virtue of the incarnation of God. Is who we are in the first place
found in the articulation of the “relation” of the One who gives himself as
Trinity (chap. I: Augustine)? To what degree is the theophany of the One who
comes to reveal himself to us made worthy then of bearing such a phenom-
enality (chap. 2: Erigena)? And finally, how is the reduction of all (including
the self) capable of opening onto the paradoxical demand of a God who
teaches us “to depend on him” (chap. 3: Eckhart)? These questions, following
a process of growing radicalization in history and the relationships among
concepts (relation [Augustine], phenomenalization [Erigena], reduction [Eck-
hart]), paradoxically find in the most concrete context of Christianity itself
the site of their highest realization, that is, in the Christological incarnation
itself as the exemplification and transformation of phenomenological incar-
nation. The “flesh” (part 2) thus takes the place of “God” (part 1), not in
order to be substituted for him, but rather in order better to incarnate him, in
the same way that the “other” (part 3) comes to manifest him: “It would be of
little value for me that ‘the Word was made flesh’ for man in Christ,” Eckhart
indicated in the conclusion of his Commentary on the Gospel of John, “unless
he was also made flesh in me personally so that I too might be God’s son.”177
Part Two
The Flesh
114 The Flesh
The Other Beginning: The Flesh

After “God” (part I) comes the “flesh” (part II). As I have already mentioned,
the relation here is not one of simple juxtaposition or even of substitution.
Instead, the relation is a matter of radical implication. Indeed, for Christian-
ity, one must pass by way of the flesh in order to speak of God properly, and
then, even pass by way of his flesh in order to speak of the human properly.
The notion of a “God-man” or the “transubstantiation of the Creator in the
creature” (Levinas) is not confined to the order of the impossible, at least
for Christianity. On the contrary, it is precisely because God became man
that it is necessary to go through man to get to God. Said otherwise, nei-
ther the “flesh” nor the “face” are only “traces of an invisible and un-seeable
God, who was seen only “from behind” when Moses renewed his covenant
with Yahweh (Ex. 33:23). Yet because of the incarnation of the Word, on
the contrary, it should be emphasized—with the help of Merleau-Ponty in a
non-confessional way—that in Christianity “transcendence no longer looms
over man: he strangely becomes the privileged bearer of it.”1 Therefore we
have come to understand in a new way at this beginning of the second part
that when it is a question of theology (Christological incarnation), we will
inevitably deal with philosophy as well (phenomenological incarnation). In
the same way that the relationship of substance to relation has made us see
the tension between metaphysics and theology (chap. 1: Augustine), and that
theophany has led us to rethink phenomenality (chap. 2: Erigena), and that,
finally, the progressive conversion from Martha to Saint Paul has radical-
ized the reduction itself (chap. 3: Eckhart), so also in part II we will see
that the figure of Adam exhibits the visibility of the flesh (chap. 4: Irenaeus),
that Christ confers on it all of its profundity (chap. 5: Tertullian), and that
brother Francis reveals to man the possibility of its phenomenalization (chap.
6: Bonaventure). It is not at all here a question of juxtaposition but rather of
rigor in formulation: the logic of theology (moving from the uncreated God
to the incarnate Word) is also a philosophical logic (from the manifestation
of the absolute [God] to the phenomenon of his bodily life [the flesh]). Thus
the famous philosophical question of Nietzsche, posed in light of the corpus
of medieval theology: “Has not philosophy in general, even until today, been
simply an explication of the flesh and a misunderstanding of the flesh?”2
This formulation, extracted from the foreword to the second edition of
the Gay Science (1886), sufficiently indicates on the one hand that we have
in no way finished “letting ourselves be explicated or unfurled” by this flesh
that we are, and on the other hand, that we must always remain subject to
a profound “misunderstanding” regarding what is probably the root of our
own nature: our existence in the flesh. Since the dawn of thought, and in its
opening consecrated by Parmenides, “what thinks in man is the develop-
ment of the flesh [meleôn phusis] in all and in each one.”3 Thus the thought
of the flesh invites us to return to the beginning before the beginning, to the
The Flesh 115
pre-Socratics before Plato. And here we observe the “failure of the flesh” in
the very one who made such a return the first axis of his thought: Heidegger.4
But beyond this attempt at a pure “return” a more justified and probably
more smoothly conducted other beginning of Western thought can be found
attested to in patristic and medieval sources. Philosophy sometimes delays
needlessly the reinterrogation of the sources that the most cutting-edge inves-
tigations on the status of the “flesh” would do well to reappropriate.
We should certainly be cautious about accusing the tradition of a massive
“forgetting of the flesh.” A number of analyses have suggested to the contrary,
that even up to Platonic thought there was present the “terror of the beauti-
ful” [l’effroi du beau] that considered the body as the original place of access
to divinity.5 It is nevertheless the case that what pretends to be a novelty of
Platonic thought, or at least such in Plotinus—the attainment of the divine
by the progressive beauty of bodies (Phaedrus)—does not serve as the norm.
It is better to say that, insofar as it is a question of the body, the turn taken
by Neoplatonism marks a breaking point, though not to say a final point, in
the assumption of the carnal for the sake of a single quest for the spiritual. To
nuance rightly this lapidary judgment is not sufficient to contradict it, at least
in its basic thrust.6 For, by dint of undervaluing or of discriminating against
it in the history of philosophy that is anything if not plural, we forget that
another history of thought was given birth in Smyrna (Irenaeus), Carthage
(Tertullian), and even later in Paris (Bonaventure). This narrative of the flesh,
in three steps made by three authors, will disclose to us what is philosophi-
cally at stake as regards embodied existence, namely for Adam’s “visibility,”
the Word’s “solidity,” and the believer’s “conversion.” The confession of faith
will not be the object of attention, or rather it will only be appealed to insofar
as it exhibits, in those who confess it, a certain experience of the flesh extend-
able to all: first for man (Irenaeus), then for God (Tertullian), and finally
for man in his relation to God (Bonaventure). The question of the body has
today become essential for philosophy in its quest for an exit from Platonism,
and the means now given to us are of phenomenologically describing our
embodiment, which we can do without making it merely the inverse of spiri-
tuality.7 Without necessarily having to partake of the light of faith shared
by the church fathers and the medievals together—although certainly not
imagined otherwise by them—the reader is invited to encounter along with
the author the new conceptuality of the body to be gained by philosophy in
the triple experience of “the simple flesh” (Adam), of “the Word made flesh”
(Christ), and of man “transformed in his flesh” (the believer). Far from being
closed, the debate between phenomenology and Christianity is in reality just
opening, if we dare to venture to the place where the phenomenological expe-
rience of God is most clear as well as most potently described—in patristic
and medieval philosophy more than anywhere else.
Chapter 4
The Visibility of the Flesh (Irenaeus)
Adam: Return to the Origin

Omne corpus fugiendum esse— “It is necessary to flee from everything
bodily.”1 This famous formula of Porphyry, near contemporary of Irenaeus
and Tertullian, marks the summit in Western thought of the forgetfulness
of corporeity. Not that the hypothesis of the flight from the body (corpus
fugiendum) properly pertains to Neoplatonism, especially to Christian
Neoplatonism—indeed, far from it. Together, and the one from the other,
they receive it on the contrary from a certain ancient tradition that should
be interrogated rather than simply denounced.2 Nevertheless, in the second
century, a new beginning in the history of thought opened a space to corpore-
ity which will not be occupied again until the dawn of modern times. Thus
Balthasar trenchantly writes: “With Irenaeus [and Tertullian] . . . even for the
spiritual man the experience of existence is close to the earth and the world
of the senses . . . It is not until Claudel [and Péguy] that a similar language
appears in Christianity . . . Not only does Spirit speak to spirit, but Flesh
which speaks to flesh. ‘Our flesh has ceased being an obstacle; it has become
a means and a mediation; it has ceased being a veil to become perception.’ ”3
Where then can we locate the forgetting of such a beginning, since the
“forgetfulness of origins” occurs most often in the “origin of forgetfulness”?
What is the point of origin starting from which thought ceased to interrogate
its decisions most often un-thought? It always comes, according to theology
and then philosophy, from the “preliminary fatal option,” or the “decision”
which, “since the time of the Fathers (as a reaction against Montanism), and
in particularly since Augustine, everything having to do with the senses and
the imagination in mystical experience is held to be fundamentally question-
able in the extreme.”4 Whatever the validity of such a diagnosis and suspicion
which raised the derision of Balthasar, something happened at the dawn of
the third century to this inheritor of Neoplatonism (Augustine) that the sec-
ond, in its Greek (Irenaeus) and Latin (Tertullian) modes, neither knew nor
was affected by, inasmuch as it remained caught up in the novelty of a Chris-
tianity still infatuated with corporeity. The philosopher Michel Henry, for
117
118 The Flesh
example, though seemingly ignorant of every theologian (such as Balthasar,

for example), has seen this with clarity when he rests his text, Incarnation,
on these two authors (Irenaeus and Tertullian). As debatable as the patristic
exegesis practiced here is, the general diagnosis remains nevertheless just:
“Thus by way of Greek concepts is sought the intelligence of truth the most
anti-Greek. Such is the contradiction in which the Fathers and Councils are
taken up more than once.”5
The figure of Adam in Irenaeus confirms in an exemplary way the neces-
sity of returning to the ancients in order to rediscover what they have to say
anew. For, if the incarnation leads us first to the profundity of the “Word
made flesh” (Tertullian), it is however no less rooted in the visibility of the
one who was first “made flesh”—Adam, or the earthly man (adâmah [earth],
Irenaeus). Not only in fact does man see God according to the bishop of Lyon,
as in his celebrated formula that “the life of man is the vision of God,”6 but
God himself also sees man in the flesh of Adam, the flesh he would assume
by his Word in the mode of prefiguration: “The Word, artisan of the universe
had, in Adam, sketched in advance [praeformauerat] the future economy of
the humanity that the Son of God assumes.”7
For living man, God is therefore certainly “revealed by the creation” in
Adam: “The Glory of God is a living man.” Yet for him the seeing God
is developed further in a text so well known that it is often only partially
quoted. The Word (new Adam) “has manifested the Father [ostendebat
Patrem].” Hence: “And the life of man is the vision of God.” Said otherwise,
in the very terms of the bishop of Lyon, “the invisible in the Son is the Father
[invisibile et enim Filii Pater], and the visible in the Father is the Son [visibile
autem Patris Filius]” (manifestation by incarnation). This leads to the unique
condition that “the Father was revealed to all in rendering his Word visible
to all.” To say “to all” (omnibus) includes the “work modeled at the origin
that he has recapitulated in himself,” namely, Adam, the revelation of God
by creation.8 The chiasm of the revealed and the manifested is such that we
will understand nothing of the salvation borne by the second Adam in the
incarnation (new Adam/Christ) until we have first examined the first Adam
in creation (first Adam/man)—not in some logical or chronological anterior-
ity, but according to an ontological figuration according to which the latter
(the Word made flesh) who is paradoxically revealed as the one who already
dwells in the first (Adam, drawn from the earth): “That which has been tied
[colligatur] cannot be untied [solueretur] unless the loops of the knot are
done again in reverse [retrorsus].”9 Irenaeus therefore insists, and here we see
that he is a philosopher as well as a theologian, that “to speak truth [verum
dicere] is precisely what concerns Adam . . . because we ourselves are all
issued from him. If man is therefore to be saved, it is necessary that he be
saved who is fashioned after the first.”10
If there is an originality in the Irenean corpus, especially concerning
its contemporary relevance, it is not, paradoxically, in the direction of the
The Visibility of the Flesh 119
deification of man, so often invoked, but in the hominization of God—

neither going without the other. And along with the emphasis too often put
on the glory of God in the “living man” by theology’s rediscovery of the
church fathers since Vatican II as well as by philosophy, in Chrétien, Marion,
and Henry, for example, it is sometimes forgotten what grounds it: the life
of man in the “vision of God” understood not only as the vision of God by
man (objective genitive) but as the vision of man (Adam) by God (subjective
genitive).11 It was in fact necessary that God be seen in Adam drawn from the
earth in order for him to become flesh. The focus on the life of man achieved
in the “vision of God” is therefore legitimate, if it is first accepted as being
seen by him, in other words surprisingly serving if not as its model, at least as
the “place of visibility” for his human and carnal incarnation: “God took on
from his own features the work thus formed, in order that even that which
appears visibly [the flesh] was made in a divine form.”12
I emphasize seeing man and beginning with man (Adam) because from the
origins the Word is “foreseen” in the flesh of man (the new Adam). Such is
paradoxically what Irenaeus envisaged—contra a current reading which, by
emphasizing the theological realm and especially divinization (the “theomor-
phosis of man”), has forgotten the philosophical and humanizing character
(the “anthropomorphosis of God”) that is also present.13 The flight from the
sensible or some medieval angelism does not taint the bishop of Lyon, and
it is wrong to interpret the “Irenean vision of God” in the sense of a pure
beatific vision, as if seeing God by the soul implied renouncing all sensation
of the body in a Platonic dualism that is entirely foreign to the very first point
of anchorage of Christianity: “He has given his soul for our soul [dante ani-
mam suam pro nostra anima] and his flesh for our flesh [et carnem suam pro
nostris carnibus].”14
The Ark of Flesh
The Ark of Speech is well known. It is all to Jean-Louis Chrétien’s credit for
having formulated the name and articulated its efficacy. When God brought
the animals to Adam “in order to see what he would name them” (Gen. 2:19),
he established the first man, by means of his earliest vocalization, as the locus
of the first welcome of creatures in words, which is also an abode in which
to dwell. This triple primacy (of the first man, his word, and the animals’
abode in him) therefore makes the ark of Adam (the “ark of speech”) the
guarantor of the most original safeguard for creatures before the ark of Noah
(“the ark of the flood”). In the word uttered by Adam, the appellation, falsely
understood as the dominion of the concept (Hegel), signifies instead the act
of naming by which God tests man and establishes the measure of his crea-
ture in its proper capacity to receive, in the first ark (language), the collection
of living beings that he leads to him: “The animals have been gathered for
120 The Flesh
human speech and brought together in this speech, which names them long
before they are brought together, according to the same story, in Noah’s ark
to be saved from the flood and the destruction it brings.”15
But before the ark of speech there is the ark of flesh, that holds a primacy
even more original, that is, the formation of Adam “drawn from the dust of
the earth” (Gen. 2:7), and that of Eve manifest in his astonished acclama-
tion: “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” (Gen. 2:23). In support of this
more original ark in Adam, it is fitting to rediscover “its beginning,” as Hus-
serl says, “the pure—and so to speak still dumb—psychological experience
which now must be made to utter its own sense with no adulteration.”16 Such
will be our leitmotif for the following. “Doing” comes before “speaking;” or
even better, before “saying” is discovered the “pre-saying,” in the sense of a
pre-predicative formation by which God gives man the existence and activ-
ity of his flesh itself as the original place of his first dwelling. Such is in fact
the teaching of Irenaeus, which we are today strongly encouraged to reap-
propriate. God first “gets his hands dirty” [la main à la pâte], as it were, in
order that Adam, drawn from the earth, exhibits by way of anticipation the
“visibility of the flesh” of his Word manifested by this image. Only then is it
consecrated “flesh” as the place of a “common speech” where the animals,
along with him, find their main habitation. “The Word was made flesh so that
the flesh could become Word,” says Mark the Ascetic, as we have seen above.
For us here this means precisely that the Word speaks even better in his flesh
than in his speech, and it is by the flesh that his speech speaks.17
Getting His Hands Dirty

Very far indeed from the Augustinian perspectives further centered on Acts of
Speech,18 Irenaeus asserts the formation of Adam from the earth as the essen-
tial: “The Lord God formed man from the dust of the earth and breathed into
his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being” (Gen. 2:7). For
the bishop of Lyon, God appears as a sort of “artist” or “potter” (artifex),
even as a plastic surgeon (cheriourgia), as it were, who has formed us by a
quasi-amorous plasmatio out of the womb of our mother (plasma) as Adam
is drawn from the earth (adâmâ). Our carnal conception corresponds to the
divine formation of the Adamic body, thus extending to the height of our
flesh what was first given in the bosom of the earth: “Jeremiah affirms that
the Word of God forms us in the maternal bosom [plasmat in ventre]: ‘Before
forming you in the womb of your mother, I knew you’ [Jer. 1:5]. In this way
therefore are we formed [plasmemur] in the maternal bosom by the Word.”19
A question is nevertheless posed here about Adam himself and also then
about the Word to come in the flesh: “Where did the substance of the first
man come from [unde ergo est protoplasti substantia]? For according to
Scripture God had not yet made rain until the man was created and there was
not yet a man to work the earth” (Gen. 2:5).20 The most naive questions are
often the most essential, and here more than elsewhere. Not yet having “one
beside him” of his kind (Eve), Adam in fact had no father, except for God
himself, nor a mother, except the earth. Therefore it is from the “virgin soil”
that Yahweh God, in a divine quasi-fecundation, takes from the dust of the
earth and forms the first man, “in order that he would be the point of depar-
ture for humanity.” His “will” and his “wisdom” were therefore joined to the
“virginity of the earth” in order to make it fecund or at least to inform it.21
The literality of such an exegesis of the narrative of creation, where the vir-
ginity of the earth is almost chronologically deduced from the double absence
of man and of rain in order to cultivate it (Gen. 2:5), together with the fecun-
dation by God of that which is still “virgin” (Gen. 2:7), is almost enough to
make the modern reader smile—if it did not articulate the profound symbolic
relation that unites man to God from the vantage of corporeity. The act of
the creation of Adam, the union of the mother earth with father God (setting
aside the question of the mythological reprise of this reading of Genesis),
teaches us anew what “dwelling” means: to dwell on “the earth” to be sure,
but also to dwell in the “flesh,” or even to dwell in the “flesh” because it is our
own “earth” and vice versa. In other words, to retrieve a strikingly Irenaean
passage from Pèguy, it means “the incarnation as a history, a history arrived
in the flesh and on the earth.”22
Earth and the Flesh. The earth, or the work formed by God (plasma), and
thus the flesh (caro), becomes that which the Son suffers and joins himself to
in his incarnation. Irenaeus reveals to us a long-forgotten perspective that,
in a new way, reveals that the “incarnation” of the Son is prefigured by the
“formation” of the flesh of Adam: “The only Son, who was always present
to humanity, was united and mingled with his own work that was formed by
him [unitus et consparsus suo plasmati] according to the good pleasure of the
Father, and so he was made flesh.”23 The work of the Father makes a unified
whole, between the generation of the Son and the anticipation of his incarna-
tion in the figure of the first man. Similarly, the “plasmation” of the Word, his
“taking on flesh,”24 depends on the formation or taking on flesh of Adam as
if it were itself a return to the origin. If the first Adam (of Genesis) prefigures
the second (the Word made flesh), it is because the second (Christ) manifests
the full humanity of the first in his original formation (Adam drawn from
the earth). This is evidenced by the strong parallel consistently established
between “the virginity of the earth” in the creation of Adam and the “virgin-
ity of the Virgin” in the incarnation of the Son. In the first material earth of
Adam is also revealed the human womb of the Son of God—and together
they are related to the one act of “formation” and “creative power” of the
Father. Far, then, from removing the Son from his true humanity, his vir-
ginal birth actually reinforces it insofar as it symbolically borrows from the
original virgin birth of Adam himself (i.e., of the earth and flesh): “In being
born of a Virgin by the will and wisdom of God, the Lord received a flesh
122 The Flesh
formed according to the same economy [eandem dispositionem (oikonomia)]

as Adam, for the sake of showing that he also was formed in a flesh like that
of [similitudinem] Adam and was being made the same man as him.”25
By forming Adam in the act of creation, the Father in some sense “gets
his hands dirty,” drawing Adam out of “the dust of the earth” and breathing
into his nostrils the “breath of life” (Gen. 2:6). And in the same way, in the
incarnation, he remains the very same artisan in drawing his Son from the
“womb” of Mary his mother by the Holy Spirit who “overshadowed” her
(Luke 1:35). The second Adam, by espousing himself to the dust drawn from
the earth, therefore assumes the first Adam by virtue of the materiality of his
own mother, receiving from her the breath of life in the Spirit welcomed by
Mary. This relation of the first and second Adam, of the breath of life and the
Spirit, and of the virgin earth and Mary the Virgin, is not a matter of a simple
correspondence, but rather that of a profound marriage or covenant. Adam
is not initially a sinner (Gen. 3:6) but rather a “living man” (Gen. 2:6), and
Christ (the new Adam), “by the righteousness of one,” does not merely heal
“the fault of one” (see Rom. 5:20). Instead, the “form of the one to come”
ought to be recognized already in this first man (see Rom. 5:14)—especially
in his flesh.26 The first work of God in Adam discloses the second act of work
performed by God, in the hand of the potter by which the clay is fashioned.
To say that God “gets his hands dirty” is to recognize that he possesses
hands and that in the precise case of the sixth day of creation (that of man),
the Father is not content with speaking, even words that perform absolutely
what they signify (“he spoke and it was”—the ark of speech) but also requires
a sort of divine-human “hand to hand” [corps à corps] by which he works
the clay out of which comes his creature (Adama—the ark of flesh): “As for
man, God forms him with his own hands.”27 God’s hands, in a similar way to
man, which are a tool (Bergson) and an “extension of the body,”28 or in other
words organs which are of the same nature as he is. Having no need—contra
every conception of Gnostic demiurges (esp. Valentin)—of angels or “any
other power” in order to create, we ought not to think that the “Father has
hands of a different nature [quasi ipse suas non haberet manus], since he has
always had with him his Word and Wisdom, the Son and Spirit.”29
The Hands of God. The famous thesis of the “two hands of God”30 in Ire-
naeus’s account of the formation of Adam ought to be taken here in the
strictest literality, and as such will be shown below definitively to deliver
Christianity from Heidegger’s false accusation concerning the equivalence of
“creation” and “production.” Not only is the Father engaged in the forma-
tion of Adam for the sake of his own self-manifestation, but also engaged
are those with whom he eternally works: the Son (Word) and Spirit (Wis-
dom). The Word is the one “through whom all things have been made by the
Father,” and the Spirit “cries ‘Abba, Father’ and forms man in the likeness
of God.” The Word “governs the Spirit [articulat Spiritum]” inasmuch as he
executes the creation decided by his Father, and the Spirit “reveals the Word
[ostendit Verbum]” inasmuch as he ordains his action according to the model
foreseen by the Father.31 Without the doctrine of the Trinity, which is not
yet fixed (Nicaea) and the idea of the appropriation of definitive attributes
(Augustine), Irenaeus, against the Gnostics who separate the persons and lose
the unity of God, nevertheless conceives of the creation from the beginning in
the terms of a “common work” of the Father, Son, and Spirit.32
It is thus not too much for the “two hands of God” to create man, since
the “hand of God [manus Dei] by which Adam was made” is also “the one
according to which we have been modeled in our turn [plasmati autem autem
sumus et nos].”33 Far from any extrinsic “flick into existence [chiquenaude],”
not only does God “preserve” his creation according to a thoroughly meta-
physical model of the permanence of substances, but he works and works
in us as he did in Adam himself who “never escaped [non enim effugit ali-
quando] the hands of God.”34 The continuity between the formation of Adam
and our own image is for Irenaeus such that it is necessary for us to conceive
of ourselves in a quasi-Adamic fashion, as the psalmist states, “coming forth
from the hands of God”: “Your hands have knit me together, fashioned me
and affirmed me” (Ps. 118 [119]: 73). Where Augustine, for example, envi-
sioned a hereditary transmission of sin, Irenaeus, by contrast, understood the
descent to be in the act of the formation of the flesh as mud drawn from the
earth: “Go down to the potter’s house and there I will make you understand
my words” (Jer. 18:2). The “act of conforming” to the image is deeper, there-
fore, than all fault, and the “clay” of the creatures will come alive all the more
as the splendor of the “King” will be manifest to it and thereby seduce it.
Never have the theological aesthetics attained such a height as they did here
in Irenaeus at the beginning: “It is not you who have made God [non enim
tu Deum facis], but God who made you [se Deus te facit]. If you are there-
fore the work of God [opera Dei], wait patiently for the Hand of your Artist
[manum artificis] who does all things at the opportune time [opportune]. I
say ‘opportune’ by relation to you who are made. Present to him a supple
and docile heart and protect the form [custodi figuram] that this Artist has
given you, bearing within you the Water which comes from him along with
the sin which hardened you and caused you to reject the imprint of his fingers
[vestigia digitorum eius]. By guarding this conformation [custodiens compag-
inationem], you will climb to perfection, for by the art of God the clay that
is in you is going to be covered over [absconditur quod est in te lutum]. His
hand has created your substance and it will cover you with pure gold within
and without so that you will be so well adorned that the King himself will be
smitten by your beauty [concupiscat speciem tuam].”35
Creation and Fabrication. We ought to realize that Irenaeus’s conception of

God’s “hands”—that by which the Father created Adam from the dust of
the earth, prefiguring there his Son, and shaping the pattern for ourselves in
124 The Flesh
the very same work—stands at a far remove from Heidegger’s false accusa-
tions of the creation as “production” where one immediately conceives, “on
the basis of a religious faith, namely, the biblical faith” that “the totality of
all beings is represented in advance as something created, which here means
made.”36 The accusation is aimed of course at Thomas Aquinas more than
Irenaeus, and intends to suggest that one should attribute to the “Thomist
philosophy”—wrongly—the paternity of a thought of ens creatum which
immediately transforms the creative activity of God to that of an “artisan”:
the “philosophy of this faith” does not represent the creation in any other way
than as “that of a craftsman” (Handwerker).37 Suffice to say that the concept
of Architectus in Thomas Aquinas and Artifex in Irenaeus is both poorly and
confusedly understood. Neither Irenaeus’s “hands of God” (manus Dei) nor
Thomas’s “first principle” (primum principium) has anything to do with an
artisanal fabrication understood as a technê producing a work exterior to it.
Since, as we have shown above in the context of the Thomist extension of the
“Augustinian relation” (ad aliquid) of the Trinity to the world,38 “creation
pertains to the genre of relation” (creatio est de genere relationis) in Aquinas.
The creation understood theologically is not only a “poetics” of the Hellenis-
tic type, but also a sort of “praxis” at least from the point of view of God and
his proper engagement in the world. Thus Thomas says that God “recognizes
himself in the work that he has produced,” in an immanent and not merely
transitive action.39
The aesthetic model of creation, as deployed by Irenaeus (retrieved to a
certain degree in Thomas Aquinas), therefore establishes Adam as the con-
tinual work [oeuvre] of God, in other words, his true “work” [ouvrage]:
“you are the work [ouvrage] of God” (opera Dei es). “To be made” (te facit)
rather than “to make oneself” (tu facis), awaiting the “opportune time” of
creation [oportune], presenting itself as material ready for the formation of
a “form” (figura), conserving this “conformation” (compaginatio) until the
“imprint of his fingers” (vestigia digitorum eius), revealing “the clay hidden
within” as the work lies already in nuce in the clay (absconditur quod est
in te lutum), and rendering the Creator himself “struck with the beauty” of
his created work [oeuvre] (concupiscat speciem tuam): such are the traits of
an aesthetic creation, rather than a technical production, of a work [oeuvre]
which “opens” [ouvre] or “installs a world,” rather than one that “rules” the
assemblage of some kind of “framework” (Gestell). Measured by Irenaeus’s
description of the creation of Adam as the “flesh of man,” it is rather the case
that the critique applies to the “work” in Heidegger, and not to creation. The
falsity of the accusation of creation as production is extendable to the con-
ception of the act of the Creator in other fathers of the church as well: “When
the work of art emerges, then a world is opened, of which it maintains the
reign. To be a work means to set up a world . . . The world is not the mere
collection of the countable or uncountable, familiar and unfamiliar things
that are at hand. But neither is it a merely imagined framework added by
our representation to the sum of such given things. The world worlds [Welt
weltet], and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in
which we believe ourselves to be at home . . . The work as work sets up a
world. The work holds open the open region of the world . . . In setting up
a world, the work sets forth the earth [stellt es die Erde her] . . . The work
moves the earth itself into the open region of a world and keeps it there. The
work lets the earth be an earth.”40
We should not take the analogy any further: first in order to avoid the
danger of any anachronism, and second in order not to identify the simple
horizontal relation of man to the sacred of the earth (the numinous) with the
vertical relation of God to the saint in creation (the economy of salvation).
It nevertheless remains that God, “getting his hands dirty” has or possesses
his own hands (manus). Bending the rules a bit, we could rightly observe
that these hands do not pertain at all to the regime of “understanding” or
“knowledge” as if the divine in Christianity had no other end than being
reduced to that which is “present-at-hand” (vorhanden) in order then to be
“ready-to-hand” (zuhanden). On the contrary, they have the responsibility of
welcoming, or better, of “gathering” (lesen) into the ark of flesh that which
is woven in the plasmatio of Adam. Since the Son “governs” (articulat) and
the Holy Spirit “reveals” (ostendit)41 as the two hands of the Father, God as
artist works [oeuvre] with his hands in opening [ouvrant] the world that, in
molding it, leaves the mark of the maker. If there is therefore one who is phe-
nomenologically “there” (Da-sein) in order to make the world “world” when
he reveals the earth, it is therefore the Father as “absolute artist” (artifex)
who makes man at the same time the place of the habitation of his own flesh.
The incarnation, prefigured in Adam, allows us to see, like every work of art,
that in the constituted work [oeuvre] the one is recognized who has carried
out the work [ouvrage]. Here no exteriority of the Creator to his creature is
possible, nor even conceivable. The true “shepherd” is not the “shepherd of
being” alone, but rather the One whose “voice” becomes the sign of his rec-
ognition and maintains his creature in existence: “The Voice of the Father is
present, from beginning to end, in the work [ouvrage] shaped by it [vox Patris
ab initio usque ad finem adest plasmati suo].”42
A question arises, however, which brings us back to the unique Irenaean
perspective: what about the formation of Adam as such? Better, how is the
Word made flesh, and how is it then that no longer only in the one who is
“drawn from the earth” (adâmâ) is spoken very precisely this carnal lan-
guage by which he has “given his flesh for our flesh” (dante carnem suam
pro nostris carnibus)?43 Now revealing itself is a new and “wise mixture” of
“earth” and “breath” (Gen. 2:6) to be sure, but also that of “body” (sôma),
soul (psuchê), and spirit (pneuma) (1 Thess. 5:23). The earth and breath of
the first Adam is thus totally renewed by the second (body, soul spirit) insofar
as the second (the Son visible in his flesh) comes to manifest everything of the
first (man drawn from the earth). Man as such (body and soul) serves as the
126 The Flesh
foundation in Irenaeus for the insertion of God into the human compound
(by the Holy Spirit) which transforms it in each part. Thus the divinity is
never given independently of the fullness of humanity, alone fit to receive the
divine and to be converted by it.
Man as Such
In the New Testament, particularly in the Gospel story of the healing of the
man blind from birth, the question of man as such is first an affair of “mud”
and “earth” before there arises any consideration of whether he is bipartite or
tripartite in structure. The passage is famous, of course, but rarely interpreted
according to the chiasm of creation and re-creation: “It is clear that the earth
[terra] with which the Lord reshaped the eyes of the man blind from birth (Jn.
9:6) is also that with which man was shaped in the beginning [quoniam et ab
initio plasmatus est homo].”44
Mud and the Voice. Here again we find the same mud—if not also in some
sense the same man. We are the descendants of Adam, more so by the con-
stitution of our flesh, according to Irenaeus, than thereafter by the accident
of our sins. We will see, therefore, in the healing of the man blind from birth,
not the liberation from fault with some return to an Adamic state in view,
but rather the place of visibility and manifestation of the original creative
act. “After saying this, he spit on the earth and made mud with his saliva.
He then applied this mud to the eyes of the blind man” (Jn. 9:6). To the
reshaping of the man blind from birth by Christ the healer, there corresponds
our own maternal shaping, itself corresponding to that maternal shaping of
the Word made flesh (Lk. 1:31; Jn. 1:14), as well as the original shaping of
Adam drawn from the earth (Gen. 2:7). Moving up the chain in reverse, the
first (reshaping of the blind man) manifests the second (maternal shaping)
and both make manifest the third (original shaping). A kind of metonym of
shapings is therefore established, as Ireneaeus himself says: “The whole is dis-
closed by means of the part” (ex parte totum ostendens). Here the economy
of salvation as “language of the flesh” always remains identical, from the
creation (Adam) to the incarnation (Word made flesh), and from the incarna-
tion to redemption (of the blind-born). In each case the same act (mixture
or blending) in different modes (earth and breath/plasma and holy Spirit/
mud and saliva) occurs, though always with the same aim: to make seen and
known the (re-)creative act of the Father in his perpetual shaping of the flesh:
“Thus, since we are shaped [plasmemur] in the maternal womb by the Word,
this same Word reshapes [formavit] the eyes of the man blind from birth: in
this way he makes to appear in the open [in manifesto ostendens] the One
who shapes us in secret [in abscondito Plasmator noster], because it is the
Word himself who was made visible [manifestum] to men; at the same time
he made known the original formation of Adam [antiquam plasmationem
Adae], in other words how Adam was made and by what Hand [manum]
he was shaped [plasmatus est]; and he made seen the whole by means of the
part [ex parte totum ostendens], because the Lord who reshaped [formavit]
the eyes was the one who had shaped [plasmavit] all men in executing the
will of the Father.”45
But the Father of his two Hands (Son and Spirit) is not content merely
to touch Adam in his act of creation, and the Word is not satisfied simply to
reshape the blind in the moment of his re-creation. The “voice of the Father”
uttered “from the beginning [ab initio]” is also joined to the flesh in order
that it be made the place of a “call”: “As God formerly called to Adam in the
evening in order to find him [“Where are you?” Gen. 3:9], so also in the latter
days, by the same voice [per eandem vocem] he has visited the race of Adam
(the blind) in order to find them [“in order that the works of God be manifest
in him” (Jn. 9:3)].”46 The identity of the flesh of Adam and the blind man is
understood therefore to be found in the singularity of “voices” (the Father
and Son’s), which establishes the body as the locus of a “vocation.” Theologi-
cally understood, the call of the flesh does not articulate the unbridled desire
of a body in search of satisfaction, but rather the unity of a substantial whole
(soul and body) completely turned toward God (Spirit): thus the passage of
a dichotomous anthropology (earth/breath, body/soul [Gen. 2:7]) to a tri-
chotomous anthropology (body/soul/spirit [1 Thess. 5:23]), the ultimate aim
of which is not to differentiate the elements of a substantial compound, but
rather to mark a new existential attitude of the entirety of the human person
turned toward God (hence the supplementation of the [holy] Spirit).
Mixture. A close reading of Irenaeus’s Adversus Haereses affirms that

humanity is most simply understood as a mixture of body and soul or earth
and breath. Against the line of interpretation that overemphasizes diviniza-
tion, it should rather be seen that, as certain commentators have seen (A.
Rousseau or J. Fantino), what matters first is the density of humanity as such
in Irenaeus—and such not without God but as a living animal tout court
(or “psychic being”). Body/soul or earth/breath suffice to define humanity
in its proper being or nature: “All this is able to be said of men [in homini-
bus] because they are composite by nature [cum sint compositi natura], being
constituted by a body [et ex corpore] and a soul [et anima subsistentes].”
Likewise: “Man is a mixture of soul and flesh [temperatio animae et carnis]
and a flesh formed in the likeness of God and formed by his hands.” And
again: “Spiritual men will never be spirits without bodies; but it is our sub-
stance [substantia nostra], composed of soul and flesh [hoc est animae et
carnis adunatio], which, by receiving the Spirit of God, constitutes spiritual
man.”47
This can never be repeated enough, in order to avoid drawing Irenae-
us’s anthropology into an angelism that does not pertain to him: “Man and
therefore Adam, considered in the common nature that makes him man, is
128 The Flesh
constituted of two elements, a body and a soul.”48 Such is the formulation

of “man as such” or even better “man tout court,” and it certainly seems
that the finitude of existence already characterized Christian theology from
its earliest beginnings, and which has so often been only deeply forgotten
since.49 The distinction of terms is still fluid in Irenaeus, for man is composed
of “body and soul” (corpus et anima) as much as of “flesh and life” (sarx et
psûchê)—yet the point is that man evades all dualism here. Of course, we
often need a third term, “spirit” (pneuma) in order to correct the Hellenistic
body/soul “bipartition” by a Pauline body/soul/spirit “tripartition” (1 Thess.
5:23). Yet it would of course be hasty to designate the bishop of Lyon’s com-
posite humanity as some kind of dualism. It is simply man as plasma or the
“initial mixture” upon which is established the possible but not de facto real-
ized deification of man as capax Dei.
Animality. It is therefore in Irenaeus the fundamental recognition [prise en

compte] and the assumption of responsibility [prise en charge] of animality—
the psychic understood as “enlivened clay” or “animated body” (following
Gen. 2:7)—that later theology massively obscured. For man to be “psychic”
is not to be opposed to his animality, as if the soul (psuchê) would make us
leave our animality, but rather on the contrary to receive it, assume it and
to “recapitulate” it in Christ: “Sown an animal body [sôma psuchikon], it
is raised a spiritual body [sôma pneumatikon]” (1 Cor. 15:44).50 As later
in Augustine’s Literal Commentary on Genesis, neither “reason” (ratio) nor
“spirit” (mens), nor “intelligence” (intelligentia) constitute the image of God
in man and his “prerogative” over the other animals.51 Man “in his totality”
is made in the image and likeness of God as “flesh” united to the soul, and as
we will see below, vivified by “the Spirit of God”: “It is man (soul-flesh-Spirit)
and not a part of man (soul without body or spirit without flesh or soul) that
is the image and likeness of God.”52 The Gnostic, and particularly Valentin-
ian Docetism in the earliest days of Christianity, giving the force of law to
the quasi-animal or psychic appearance of man and Christ, matters at least
as much or even more than the Christic angelism or his pneumatic character
that some claim to have rediscovered today (the so-called Christos angelos).
The readings of the Irenaean corpus that are too quickly divinizing (“the
glory of God is the living man”), as we emphasized above, forget his entrance
into matter from top to bottom humanizing. It is by his taking of a body, the
“vivification” of man by God, precisely, that humanity is justified: “There are
two dimensions to the living man [vivens homo]: he is living [vivens] thanks
to participation in the Spirit, and man [homo] by the substance of the flesh.”53
The realism of the Word made flesh fights here against his mere semblance
and the Adamization of Christ makes a stand against his too immediate glori-
fication: “By virtue of his superabundant love he became what we are [factus
est quod sumus nos] in order to make us that which he is [uti nos perficeret
esse quod est ipse].”54
The Divine Interlacing

For Irenaeus man “as such” or man “tout court” bears an existence through
himself. It is not that he does not depend on God or is not ordered toward
him, but rather that he is discovered to be created capable of welcoming
the novelty of the divine Event—according to a metamorphosis or transfor-
mation, though not by a pure restoration (of the Edenic state) or simple
achievement. The ontological consistency of the composite (soul/body) ought
thus to be maintained in order to serve as a support to the transforming
action of God (by the Holy Spirit): “May the God of peace sanctify you,
and may your being—spirit [pneuma], soul [psuchê] and body [sôma]—be
guarded against reproach in anticipation of the coming of the Lord” (1 Thess.
5:23). Irenaeus is clearer here in his interpretion of Saint Paul than the later
equivocations of the commentators. The mixture “soul/body” (psuchê/sôma)
of the first Testament (Gen. 2:7) receives the “divine breath” (pneuma) in the
second and is prefigured in the first, since the initial mixture forms a consti-
tuted whole capable of receiving the power of God. Here the spirit (pneuma)
or, in other words, God or the divine Holy Spirit is neither totally inscribed
in the interior of man in a purely intrinsicist way (de Lubac, Sesboüé), nor
totally coming from the exterior in a unilaterally extrinsicist perspective
(Fantino). Let us attempt to prove (a) the complete distinction, on the one
hand, of the “mind” (psuchê) animating the body (sôma) and the Holy Spirit
(pneuma) in-breathing them together and (b) the insertion, even the interlac-
ing, on the other hand, of the Holy Spirit himself (pneuma) in relation to the
spirit of man (psuchê) animating his body (sôma).55
Sôma, Psuchê, Pneuma. (a) The bishop of Lyon could not be clearer: “Our
substance [nostra substantia], that is, the composite of soul and flesh [hoc
est animae et carnis adunatio], constitutes spiritual man [spiritalem homi-
nem perfecit] in receiving the Spirit of God [assumens Spiritus Dei].”56 We
can nicely distinguish here between the “spirit of man” (psuchê or anima)
tied to his “flesh” (sarx or caro) or “body” (soma or corpus), and the “Spirit
of God” (pneuma or spiritus), which by “in-breathing” or interlacing with
him, renders him spiritual or pneumatic. The human spirit (psuchê), given to
psychic men or living beings, is in fact in relation only with “the act of their
creation,” and is their “condition” (secundum conditionem). Thus the psuchê
or anima is a “created thing” (quod est factum) since it remains constitutive
of the human composite given at its very creation as an element of the mix-
ture or composite of soul and body which makes man “as such” (psuchê and
soma). The Spirit (pneuma), on the contrary, given to spiritual or pneumatic
men only, is not an originarily given element of the human constitution. Man
receives it by “adoptive filiation” (secundum adoptionem), which indicates,
according to the motif of finitude, that it is first necessary to be man in order
then to be called son of God. Thus the Holy Spirit does not indicate man “in
130 The Flesh
his finished state” [tout fait] but man “in an unfinished state” [se faisant],
which indicates that what is given by God (quod est ex Deo) can be refused.
The ontologically neutral thickness of the creation that confers on man a
membership in animality and life in general is also the condition of the recep-
tion of grace. The Father is given to “sons” who are capable of receiving him,
and not to beings so oblivious of their creaturely ontological weightiness that
they lose the originary pedestal that is theirs by virtue of their very being: “He
gives to the psychics by relation to their creation [secundum conditionem],
the mind [anima] fitting for creation, and which is a created thing [quod est
factum]; he gives to the pneumatics by relation to their adoptive filiation
[secundum adoptionem] the Spirit [pneuma] which comes from the Father
and which is his ‘Offspring.’ ”57
God and Man Interlaced. (b) Now comes the “Spirit of God” or the “Holy
Spirit” (pneuma) himself to animate or vivify the “spirit of man” (psuchê)
which animates or vivifies his body (sôma). This the bishop of Lyon indicates
with similar clarity: “Everyone will agree that we are a body drawn from the
earth [corpus sumus de terra acceptum] and a soul which receives the Spirit
of God [et anima accipiens a Deo Spiritum].”58 The soul (psuchê) serves here
as “node” or “point of enfleshment” (Péguy) between the corporeal (sôma)
and spiritual (pneuma)—even a sort of medium or middle term between the
human and divine. It is the “soul” (anima) and not “the body drawn from
the earth” which receives the “Spirit of God.” This certainly does not signify
that the body itself (sôma) makes the choice of passing by the mind [l’esprit]
of man (psuchê) in order to be given to his spirit and his body (psuchê and
sôma). Therein only what is animated by the most ordinary breath of life
is able to receive or refuse God: “Man passes to the glory of the Father by
being interlaced with the Spirit of God [complexus Spiritum Dei].”59 Such an
interlacing of the divine and human, as a spiritual chiasm relaying the carnal
plasmation of Adam, accounts for what we name here a true insertion of
the divine in the human, following Péguy: wherever the “very mystery of the
carnal” is, there is the “insertion of the spiritual in the carnal,” and wherever
the “mystery of the temporal” is, there is the “insertion of the eternal in the
temporal”—“in a word, there is the mystery of the incarnation.”60
Thus the (Holy) Spirit is not added to the composite of soul and body in
the manner of a third substance nor in order to tie them together as if they
had no substantiality or unity in themselves. On the contrary, the pneuma
requires or rather proposes a quasi-divine mode of being on the composite
itself—inserting and in-breathing his Spirit (pneuma) on the mind or soul
of man (psuchê) as it becomes one with his body (sôma) or flesh (sarx). The
mention of the perfection of the pneumatic over the psychic marks precisely
this mediation of the choice proper to the human soul that renders man per-
fectible: “The perfect man [perfectus homo] is the mixture and union of the
soul [commixtio et adunitio animae] which has received the Spirit of the
Father [assumentis Spiritum Patris] and has been mixed with the flesh [et
admixtae ei carni] modeled according to the image of God.”61
What matters in Irenaeus is therefore the perfection in the union and inter-
lacing of the Creator and his creature, and the modality of being rather than
substance, by which the “soul” (anima/psuchê) receives the “Spirit” (spiritus/
pneuma) in being itself combined with a “flesh” (caro/sarx) or a “body” (cor-
pus/soma). Here lies the properly philosophical and existential thought of
Irenaeus, who, instead of dividing man into discrete substances as much as
into regions of being (soul, body, Spirit), makes on the contrary the dynamic
of the encounter between man and God the place of their eternally sealed
espousal. As Adeline Rousseau has emphasized: “One thing is a man consid-
ered from an abstract point of view, in the nature he holds common with all
men; another thing is a man considered from the concrete point of view, in
his existential comportment, in the drama of the decision in which, in open-
ing (or closing) himself freely to the call of God, he receives (or refuses) the
full realization of his being in view of which he has been created. From the
first point of view, man is body and soul; from the second, he is—or at least
is invited to be—infinitely more.”62 The spiritual man is therefore not distin-
guished from the psychic man, understood as a unity of soul and body only
inasmuch as the first has something else that the second does not have. On
the contrary, he is the same man, identically drawn from the earth and breath
(body and soul), but realized in his divine vocation since he receives the Spirit
of God. Neither does the “flesh” nor the “soul” nor even the “Spirit” consti-
tute the perfected man for Irenaeus, but only the one who, having sufficiently
measured and inhabited the depths of his properly human mixture, is able
thus to receive the breath and insertion of God, as the amorous plasmatio
most proper to his created state: “The formed flesh [plasmatio carnis] in itself
is not perfect man: it is only the body of man and therefore a part of man.
The soul [anima] in itself is not more of man [than the body]: it is only the
soul of man and therefore a part of man. Neither is the Spirit [Spiritus] man:
for we give to it the name of Spirit and not man. It is the union and mixture
of all these things [commixtio et unitio horum omnium] which constitutes
the perfect man.”63
From the Invisible to the Visible. There remains then the image (imago)
or likeness (similitudo) that man acquires, or loses, in his relation to God
according to whether he receives or not the Spirit (pneuma) come to vivify
divinely his composite as such.
The metaphor of the “icon” has certainly been appropriately developed
close to the heart of Christian thought, established against all the idolatrous
representations of God: “The Son is the image [eikôn] of the invisible God”
(Col. 1:15). But the primacy of the “icon” (eikôn) over the idol (eidolon)
masks at the same time the truly positive status of the “image” (imago) in
Christianity.64 Not only does the Son refer to the “invisible profundity”
132 The Flesh
(bathos) of the Father, but even more he renders visible the Father himself
and works his manifestation through himself. The visibility of God, or better,
his act of visibilization, is what properly characterizes Christianity, especially
in Irenaeus from the beginnings of the tempora Christiana: “The invisible
reality [invisibile] seen in the Son is the Father,” Irenaeus affirms, if only to
add that “the visible reality [visibile] in which we have seen the Father is the
Son.”65 This has been noted from the beginning of this text, in the guise of the
guiding question of this entire work. That “no one is able to see the face of
God, except his backside” (Ex. 33:23) is a fundamental trait of Judaism more
than Christianity, which a number of Neoplatonic theologians, including
Denys the Areopagite, resume in their own way. The originality of Christian
ity lies elsewhere—perhaps in the response of Jesus to Phillip seeking the
“way” to get to God: “He who has seen me has seen the Father. Why do you
say, ‘show us the Father’?” (Jn. 14:9). Commenting on this, Irenaeus finds in
“seeing” and “touching” the divine our own most pressing questions: “By the
agency of the Word become visible [visibilem] and palpable [palpabilem] in
person, the Father is shown [Pater ostendebatur] . . . The Father is revealed to
all by rendering his Son visible to all [omnibus visibilem faciens], as the Word
has shown the Father and Son to all [ostendebat Patrem et Filium], since he
has been seen by all [ab omnibus videretur].”66
It could not be expressed any more clearly. Insisting rightly on the vis-
ibility of the Father in the Son, Irenaeus requires a sort of “revenge of the
image over the icon” since the visibility and carnal manifestation of God are
nothing other than the center and heart of the Christian message: “The motif
of the incarnation is therefore in the visibility of the Son,” even of the Father
himself.67 Far from being uniquely theological, the opening appears here at
the same time philosophical. Is it sufficient to speak of an aesthetic of invisi-
bility (Malevich, Kandinsky, Rothko) as far as the meaning of the Incarnation
in Christianity is concerned, given that the figuration or even the “figural”
returns in force at the heart of the most contemporary artistic research
(Bacon, Lucian Freud, etc.)? The question certainly exceeds the scope of this
little study on Irenaeus but it cannot nevertheless be avoided given that from
theology to aesthetics there plays a relation for which a “theological aesthet-
ics” (in distinction, of course, from “aesthetic theology”) is able to teach us
about philosophy as much as theology.68
The Revenge of the Image
We will not linger here on the purely contemporary perspectives which evoke
a possible or even necessary “revenge of the image” over the icon. Some crit-
ics of contemporary art have attempted this, and justify the enterprise in
this way: “With the new positioning of the artist proclaimed image-maker,”
as Wim Delvoye says, “it is perhaps the revenge of the image over the icon
which is happening . . . By opting for the icon, modernity took advantage of

a disincarnation of art . . . The reintroduction of figurative painting over the
last few years, faithful to an avant-garde conception of art . . . restores the
place of the image in the modern perspective . . . Here the human figure takes
up a dominant position which is often manifest across the entire frame or
by way of a close up of the body.”69 Against some “abstractive” derivatives
of theology (separating man from God and keeping him in his unfathom-
able invisibility) and also of aesthetics (abstract art), Irenaeus serves as a
counterpoint in order theologically to reveal the “figural” in the apparition
of the incarnate Word and aesthetically to render visible, like Francis Bacon
for example, flesh in motion: “It took the extraordinary work of abstract
painting to tear modern art away from figuration.” So said Gilles Deleuze. He
continues: “But is there not another way, one that is more direct and more
sensible . . . ? If painting is fond of the Figure, if it takes the second way, it
will be in order to oppose the ‘figural’ to the figurative.”70
The Figural
What then is the meaning of the “image” in Irenaeus (imago) and also of the
flesh as “image of the Incarnate Word”? If the vocabulary of the “image”
(imago) and “likeness” (similitudo) is not yet fixed in Irenaeus,71 the reality
that they designate is no less clear: the image takes the side of the visibility of
God and therefore of the “flesh of Adam” as the prefiguration of the visibility
of the incarnate Son (sarx); and the likeness, less commonly used in Irenaeus,
leads to the perfecting of the soul (psuchê), which, receiving the Spirit of God
(pneuma), freely passes, through a decision, to its own glorification, attract-
ing to this end at the same time its own body to which it always remains
attached.72
The Image and the Figure. In order to show precisely how the “revenge of the
image” properly characterizes the Irenaean doctrine of the imago Dei relative
to the later theologies that take refuge in invisibility, the Adversus Haereses
yields a philosophical definition of the image, of which it properly belongs to
the incarnate Word to initiate or rather to form a model for it: “The figure
[typus] and the image [imago] are sometimes different from the reality by
virtue of their material [secundum materiam]; but they ought to guard its like-
ness [similitudinem] by the form [secundum habitum], revealing by means of
what is present [per praesentia illa] that which is not present [quae non sunt
praesentia].”73 What “makes the image” in the image, according to Irenaeus, is
therefore less the matter as such (secundum materiam) (an image or statue of
the emperor is commissioned precisely in order to reveal him who is absent)
than it is the manner in which the one who is presented there is rendered
present yet nevertheless remains absent (secundum habitudinem). The image
in this sense does not represent [figure] the absent only in a negative way, as
134 The Flesh
is normally believed in an ontological depreciation of the image by relation to

the original [modèle], but it renders it on the contrary otherwise and positively
present, according to its manner of being (habitus) rather than according to
matter (materia). I even see the “same emperor” when I see the statue of the
emperor and when I encounter him “in flesh and bone”—similarly it is the
“same sheet of paper” as in the famous example of Sartre, that I “represent”
to myself in my head and that which is set before me when I write. Both the
emperor and the sheet of paper appear to me in two different modalities:
either according to “matter” or according to “manner.”74 The philosophical
perspective, which does not depreciate the image at all but rather lays bare
its phenomenological character as a possible mode of presence in absence,
precisely establishes the character of the image of the Son in his relation to the
Father, on the one hand, and his relation to Adam, on the other.
The Image of the Father. Let us first look at the relation of the Son to the
Father. Irenaeus is wholly faithful to the hymn from Colossians (1:15): “The
image of God [imago Dei] is the Son [Filius est], in whose image man was
made.”75 It is certainly to Irenaeus’s merit to have seen that the imaging struc-
ture holds not only in the relation of God to man. It is first rooted in the
Trinity itself in which it gains meaning. The Son is “image of the Father”
insofar as he reveals the Father, certainly, but also in that this act of reveal-
ing also reveals himself. This “self manifestation” (phainesthai) characterizes
the knowledge of the Father as such, arch-phenomenon of all phenomena:
“The Son reveals the knowledge of the Father by his own manifestation [per
suam manifestationem]: this manifestation of the Son is the knowledge of the
Father [agnitio enim Patris est Filii manifestatio].”76 This “self-showing” that
is for Irenaeus prohibited to the Father held in invisibility is not negative in
the sense that he is not able to do it, but positive in the sense that he chooses
to use his Son as a sort of “prism” and “emissary” in order to make himself
seen, just as a “good” son reveals and manifests his father as he resembles him
trait for trait: “In the same way as a king who has himself traced the portrait
of his son [imaginem filii] rightly says that this portrait is his own [sui] for this
twofold reason that it is his son and he made it himself, thus it goes with the
name of Jesus Christ.”77 This Son who so fully reveals the Father, what more
does he bring forth? Himself: “He brings forth everything new [omnem novi-
tatem] in bringing forth his own person [semetipsum] announced in advance.”
Understood always with his Father, the Son is not content to remain in the
refuge of the kingdom of invisibility in order to manifest the one he resembles
trait for trait—his Father. He is also himself as this King who, once he has
“arrived in the court of his subjects,” makes it so that the “judicious Gen-
tiles no longer pose the question concerning what the King has brought forth
anew [quid novi] by relation to those who announced his coming, for he has
brought forth his own person [semetipsum].”78 Such is the meaning of the
incarnation of the Word considered dynamically in his original relation to the
creation of Adam, where the image (imago) is no longer simply spatial resem-
blance (the “portrait”) but a temporal dynamic (the “figure”).
The Model of Adam. In the relation of the Son to Adam, the Word who was
the image (of the Father) somehow becomes the model of the one who now
becomes the image (Adam). Let us make no mistake, however. The theme of
expression from the Father to the Son and of the Son to the figure of Adam
in no way resembles the degrading movement of the copy to model as one
finds famously in book 10 of Plato’s Republic.79 Expression is not decline,
but rather an act of visibilization, even of manifestation. No ontological loss
is produced from model to its image—on the contrary. It is precisely because
and thanks to its expression in and by an image (imago) that the model enjoys
the precedence of serving as model. As I have already noted above, Irenaeus
states: “His hand has created your substance; it will cover you with pure gold
within and without, and it will adorn you so well that the King himself will
be struck by your beauty [concupiscat speciem tuam].”80 Far indeed from
any Neoplatonic derivation, here the visible overtakes the invisible, as the
tangible overtakes the intangible, without falling into some kind of empiri-
cism which would grossly substitute the physical reality of the thing itself for
the phenomenological expressionism of its manifestation. The Son, model of
Adam who is his own model, sees in the rough sketch of the first man drawn
from the earth the first traits of the work that will render him fully visible by
manifestation in his own flesh. There is an ambiguity to the notion of “mod-
eling” here that should be highlighted. “Paul calls Adam himself the ‘figure of
the one who is to come’ [typus futuri (Rom. 5:14)], because the Word, artisan
of the universe, had drafted in advance of Adam [praeformaverat in Adama]
the future economy which the Son of God would assume.”81
From a Rough Sketch (Ébauche) to Depravity (Débauche)

Everyone knows the two famous sculptures of the “creation of Adam” at the
north portal of the cathedral of Chartres, however well hidden they are in
the arches—even so, they are incapable of hiding the absolute novelty that
Chartrean humanism was in the process of rediscovering: on the one hand,
there is Adam lying down with his head on the knees of the Word in order
to be shaped by him; on the other hand, there is the same Adam standing up
behind the figure of Christ as his most proper prefiguration. What we see
here—standing many centuries apart from Irenaeus—shows precisely what
must be thought through in his work, though of course a filiation of Char-
trean humanism from Irenaean Greek patrology would not be able to be
established.82
The Rough Sketch of the Word. Adam as a sketch of the Word made flesh
is hardly a rough draft, but rather its “pre-
formation” (praeformaverit).
136 The Flesh
Coming before, he paradoxically also came after, since it is only later or after
the fact—that is, in the incarnation of the Word—that the one who came first
(Adam) appears as the one formed later (as a simple sketch), and that the
one who came later (Christ) is revealed as the one who was presented first
(the model). Adam, as “prototype” of humanity or “figure of the one who
was coming” (typus futuri), will never be the “antitype” as he will later be in
Saint Augustine, who focuses on the other part of this same verse from Saint
Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: “Death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over
those who did not sin by a transgression identical to that of Adam” (Rom.
5:14).83 By a temporal reversal of the image, in which Irenaean anthropol-
ogy has nothing of the static character of a number of later theologies, the
“figure” (figura) announcing what has already been accomplished makes the
first Adam the “reason for being” of the second in his project of salvation
(Christ), less in order to exist than in order to be fully manifest: “Since the
One who would save [saluans] already existed, it was necessary that the one
who would be saved [salvaretur] came also into existence so that this Savior
was hardly without a reason for being [non vacuum sit].”84
Neither a Thomist simple attribution of the motivations for the incarna-
tion starting from redemption, nor a Scotist preeminence of the incarnation
by glorification rather than redemption, the “justification” of salvation here
envisaged (non vacuum sit) is concerned less with motives or reasons (as if
it were necessary to abstract from the incarnation in order to justify it by
some “necessary reasons”) but rather depends on a simple observation of
the fact established by “reason of its fittingness” according to which “God
had no need of man [indigens Deus hominis]” in forming Adam except “in
order to have someone on whom to dispose his benefaction [ut haberet in
quem collocaret sua beneficia].”85 In the beginning God formed Adam “with
his gifts in view” (propter suam munificentiam). He thus consecrated man as
“l’adonné,” as the screen on which is revealed and projected the movement
of the donation of the Father.86 The “flesh” in this sense (sarx), this plasma
of the earth vivified by the “soul” (puchê) and awaiting the “Spirit of God”
(pneuma), is a place of weakness and infirmity (infirmitas) not only as a result
of sin or fault (as in the Augustinian perspective), but also because its fragil-
ity makes it vulnerable, thus submitting to the excess of the donation of the
Creator’s power: “The flesh [caro] will be found capable of receiving and
containing the power of God [virtutis Dei], since in the beginning it received
the art of God . . . ; the power of God, which procures life, is deployed in
weakness [in infirmitate], that is, in the flesh [hoc est in carne].”87 As for the
relation of the flesh of Adam to the flesh of the Word that comes to complete
it, the first is not already lacking in humanity since his composite suffices to
constitute it. For Irenaeus, to think of man always “lacking” is to demean
him as well as to render indecent the figure of God by defining him only as a
collection of benefits destined to satisfy our needs. A “salvation of our flesh”
(salutem carnis nostrae) is properly speaking necessary, as ought to be well
understood by now, not only to make reparation for our faults, but in order
to manifest how, in the restricted framework of the visibility of the body, the
invisibility of the excess of God can also be given there: “If the flesh should
not be saved [si non haberet caro salvari], the Word of God would not have
been made flesh [nequaquam Verbum Dei caro factum esset].”88
For Irenaeus of course, the carnal figuration of God remains counted
among those things that are the most difficult and even impossible for man:
“What is man that you think of him, human being that you care for him?”
(Ps. 8:5). Where the “image” (imago) designates hitherto the double visibility
of the Father in the Son and the Son in man inasmuch as the rough-hewn
form in Adam only fully appears in the full realization of the work that is the
incarnation itself, God leads or maintains the “likeness” [similitude] there,
less in order to distinguish the one from the other, than to leave man the
choice of being conformed to the likeness when he does not have the choice
to receive the image. Transposing this into the framework of the “revenge
of the image,” what we discovered in the “ark of flesh,” that is, the purely
human constitution of man, makes the soul and body (sôma and psuchê)
suffice to constitute the image: “Man is a mixture of soul and flesh, flesh
formed according to the likeness of God [secundum similitudinem Dei]”—
though here the “likeness” (similitude) is not distinguished in any way from
the “image” (imago).89 Said otherwise, we are already by means of our body
the image of God, inasmuch at least that the “God-made body” in the incar-
nation will reveal that of which we were already the image—a divine body,
or at least one called to be divinized.
Things are otherwise from the moment that the Word, “showing the
image” (imaginem ostendit)—showing the Father as much as the flesh of
Adam—“reestablishes the likeness” (similitudinem restituit). Therefore some-
thing has been lost of the likeness [similitude], which does not pertain to the
image (imago), that is, liberty rather than the flesh, the power of “depravity”
[dé-bauche] rather than the formation of a rough sketch [é-bauche]: “When
the Word of God is made flesh [caro Dei factum est] he will confirm both:
he makes the image appear [imaginem ostendit] in all of its truth, by him-
self becoming that which is his own image, and he reestablishes the likeness
[similitudinem restituit] to stability by rendering man fully like the invisible
Father [invisibili Patri] by means of the Word henceforth visible [per visibile
Verbum].”90
The Depravity of Adam. Let us say of man that he was “de-bauched” [dé-
bauché] or better “led astray” [dé-baucha], understood etymologically as the
one who was not faithful to his “rough sketch” [e-bauche] (the carnal figura-
tion of God) for which also he was, as it were, “recruited” [embauché] (in
order to work to prepare the figure of the One who was to come). The vision
here is far removed from the “ethical debauchery” which we see, for example,
in Augustine’s reading of his “conversion” in book 8 of his Confessions.91 For
138 The Flesh
Irenaeus, the loss of the “likeness” (similitude) does not affect the “image,”
that is, the “flesh” (sarx/caro) and “soul” (psuchê/anima) as initial mixture,
but only the power of man to receive the “Spirit of God” (pneuma/spiritu)
in the act of a free choice: “To the contrary when the Spirit [Spiritus] lacks
the soul [animae], such a man, truly remaining psychic [animalis] and carnal
[carnalis], will be imperfect, possessing the image of God [imaginem Dei] in
the work formed through him [in plasmate] though not having received the
likeness [similitudinem] by means of the Spirit [per Spiritum].”92
It could hardly be clearer. The image (imago) remains ever unchanging in
the initial soul-body composite (anima and corpus). Only the likeness (simili-
tudo) can be earned or lost by virtue of its relation to the “Spirit of God”
(Spiritus) in its insertion or interlacing with the soul of man tied to his proper
body. The likeness is therefore only given to a freedom capable of accepting
or refusing it, whereas the image simply accounts for an ontological consis-
tency of humanity and serves as the ground for reception of the likeness. Man
must first be the image of God in order to receive God (by means of the simple
constitution of his natural being), or in other words to receive or refuse the
likeness (which is a manner of living this constitution as radically animated
[insufflée] by God). Thus the “likeness” properly characterizes “man free in
his decision [libera sententia],” like God, also “free in his decision [libera
sententia],” which is precisely the “likeness” (similitudo) according to which
we have been created, since we have been revealed fit to receive it: “From the
beginning man is free in his decision [liberae sententiae ab initio est homo]
because God is also free in his [et liberae sententiae est Deus] in whose like-
ness [cujus ad similitudinem] man has precisely been made.”93
Perfectible Man. Here we may note a striking coherence between the anthro-
pology of Irenaeus and his ethics. Put more strongly, his ethics itself is
“anthropological,” even “metaphysical” in that it designates not so much a
collection of rules which can be either obeyed or transgressed, but rather a
manner of being of the one who lives by relation to the Other in general, and
here, especially, to God—the one who faces me to whom I am in my being
fundamentally indebted.94 For Irenaeus it is hardly a sign of imperfection that
Adam was not created “perfect from the beginning” (perfectum ab initio).
In the same way that the possible “perversion” [dé-bauche] (not receiving
the divine pneuma) presupposes a “recruitment” [em-bauche] or a work to
be accomplished, so also is true perfection found in the “perfectibility” yet
to come rather than in the pure and simple possession of that which, by
rendering me perfect, forgets the very passage leading to perfection. “That
which is offered automatically and that which is found only at great cost
are not loved equally [similiter].” He continues later: “In the same way that
a mother can give perfect nourishment to her newborn, who is yet incapable
of receiving nourishment beyond his age [1 Cor. 3:2], thus God could give
to man his perfection from the beginning [ab initio perfectionem homini],
but man was incapable of receiving it [impotens percipere illam] because he

was only a little infant.”95 Everything is inverted and justifies the work we
have to do as the passage from the “ready-made” image to “being made”
in the likeness. The model is pedagogical and not metaphysical, pertaining
to the economy of salvation and not to theodicy: the most imperfect will
paradoxically be perfection itself, the greatest perfection returning first to be
recognized “imperfect,” the Adamic rough sketch of the glory of God yet to
be completed in the flesh.
It is death that truly puts an end to our perfectibility, that is, to our capac-
ity to become better when we are far from yet being the best. Is this something
to be distressed about for Irenaeus? Far from it. The benevolence of God is
such that he will arrest by death the insupportable weight (at least for us) of
not having attained perfection. If life in the Spirit (pneuma) is an expansion,
the resurrection of the soul, carrying with it the flesh (sarx and psuchê), is
salvation, in that it transforms or metamorphosizes all at once what we could
have never reached by our own strength.
Mortality and Salvation

Following Saint Augustine, Catholic doctrine has often been thought to teach
that biological death was a “consequence of sin”—an argument that some of
the most recent research has shown to require nuance.96 Such is not the view
of Irenaeus, standing as he is at the beginning of Christianity, for whom death
does not signify the lone end of life, but rather “a manner of being appropri-
ate to the living” when the living experiences the loss of the breath of life
by which he has received existence: “To die is to lose the manner of living
proper to the living [vitalem amittere habilitatem], to become without breath,
without life, without movement, and to dissolve into the elements of which
one has received the principle.”97 One must be careful here in understanding
this. Irenaeus does not make of death a “mode of life” as in Heidegger by his
distinction between anguish of death and the fear of death.98 Yet it is true
that death designates the putrefaction of the body for Irenaeus, which is itself
envisaged as a manner of living, not in anguish as in Heidegger (which would
only be a result of the human composite cut off from God), but in the act of
welcoming, even awaiting, that which arrives (from the time that God liber-
ates, by means of this very destruction, a soul attached to itself and thereby
not completely filled with the divine pneuma).
Death through Mercy. Far from being a punishment (Augustine), for Irenaeus
death paradoxically marks an excellence—that by which “God, mercifully
[miserans] puts an end to the transgression, interposing death and thereby
causing sin to cease.”99 The perspective here is retrospectively original and
merits being recalled today. Like many of our contemporaries, the totality
of the Irenaean corpus at the beginning of Christianity witnesses to a view
140 The Flesh
according to which to be born is to be ordered toward death. Far from being

a response to the prohibition of a life misled by the fault, the “dissolution of
the flesh” on the contrary saves from being further misled into sin. This is
certainly a radical idea, particularly when seen from our vantage at the far
end of a tradition many centuries old. Death as a result unfolding from sin,
as its consequence and most appropriate punishment (Augustine), is given
as if it were before the deed as salvation from what is otherwise a perpetual
accusation (Irenaeus): “In order that man not remain always a transgres-
sor . . . God assigned to him a limit by means of the dissolution of his flesh
[carnis resolutionem] which would be done on the earth.”100 In short, the
victory of the Resurrection over our mortal being does not ensure the protec-
tion or even a return to some kind of immortality from which we fell in sin.
For Irenaeus, death is already the place of salvation, putting a physical end
to our possibility of sinning, rather than designating the consequence of a sin
already realized.
We can therefore ask: Why the Resurrection if the paradoxical salvation
by death frees us already from the achievement of what is impossible for us?
The answer: in order to achieve, precisely, the salvation of the flesh by the
flesh, for nothing of the human remains in God if it is not “recapitulated” in
Christ: “If God did not vivify [si Deus non vivificat] that which is mortal and
if he did not elevate to incorruptibility that which is corruptible, God would
cease being powerful [jam non potens Deus].”101 The power of God in his
Spirit justifies the very act of elevating Adam in the heart of his flesh, making
of his metamorphosis or transformation the admission of his powerlessness
to accomplish it by himself: “The transfiguration [transfiguratio] by which
our mortal and corruptible flesh becomes immortal and incorruptible does
not come from out of his substance itself; this transfiguration comes from
the action of the Lord who has the power of procuring immortality for that
which is mortal and incorruptibility for that which is corruptible.”102
The Lectio Difficilior. In order to complete the carnal logic of the carnal
salvation of Adam in the incarnate and resurrected Word, Irenaeus’s thought
continues with the idea that it was “otherwise more difficult” to create Adam
“when nothing existed [ex non exsistentibus]” than to “reconstitute him
afterward [deinde],” once he has already come into existence.103 The act of
creation is paradoxically more complicated than new creation or resurrection
in that in the act of creation “everything” is made from “nothing” whereas
the second transforms “something” (us in our terrestrial combination) from
someone (the Son resurrected by the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit).
The lectio difficilior for us today was the lectio facilior of yesterday (the
meaning of resurrection), and the lectio difficilior of yesterday is the lectio
facilior today (the awareness of the world as created). Perhaps philosophy,
like theology, separating the extremes too much, has lost the sense of the unity
and carnal integrity of salvation made visible in the flesh of the Resurrected.
Hence in a magisterial and almost carnal way, the bishop of Lyon writes: “In
the flesh of our Lord [in carnem Domini nostri] the light of the Father has
burst in [occurat paterna lux]; then, in shining from his flesh [et a carne eius
rutila], this light came into us [veniat in nos]. In this way man has passed on
to incorruptibility [et sic homo deveniat in incorruptelam], enveloped by the
light of the Father [circumdatus paterno lumine].”104
A Near God. Moving from the creation in the flesh to the resurrection of
the flesh by way of the node of carnal incarnation, Christianity definitively
parts from some mere far off God, so effaced in his invisibility to be accused
of remaining indifferent to our humanity, and conceives of him as one who
is as close to us as our everyday nature: “He is also with each one of us
[cum unoquoque nostrum]: ‘Am I not also a God nearby [approprinquans
ego sum], declares the LORD, and not a God far off [et non Deus de longin-
quo]? Who can hide in secret so that I cannot see them?’ ” (Jer. 23:23).105 We
therefore have nothing to envy of the angels—and surely it is to the merit
of Irenaeus and Tertullian after him (chap. 6) that they teach this valuable
insight. The true good of man is not found in becoming incorporeal, but
rather in being and forever remaining “con-corporeal” with the Son who is
“made” flesh (incarnation) all the way to its resplendence (and ours in his) in
the light of the Father (resurrection). And so Irenaeus concludes the Adversus
Haereses with these words: “The angels aspire to contemplate these myster-
ies, but they are not able to fathom the Wisdom of God, by the action of
which the work modeled by him is rendered conformed and con-corporeal
to the Son [conformatum et concorporatum Filio] . . . the creature thus sur-
passes the angels and develops into the image and likeness of God.”106
The Sign of Jonah and the Sign of Emmanuel. The sign of Jonah—where
“God permitted him to be swallowed by a sea monster” (Jonah 2:1)—reaches
its deepest meaning in and through the sign of Emmanuel—where “God is
with us” (Is. 7:14) and descends into the depths of the earth in order to
find his lost sheep. By means of the first sign we are drawn out of “sin,” as
Jonah provokes a strong repentance in the Ninevites (Jonah 3:1). By means
of the second sign the Lord “effects in himself the resurrection from the
dead” (1 Cor. 15:20) where his flesh joins ours to form a single body. With
the incarnate and resurrected Word, “something greater than Jonah is here”
(Matt. 12:41) not only because he overflows and even surpasses the necessity
of the sign by his presence, but because salvation in his flesh, certainly leading
to repentance (salvation by redemption), also reveals his brilliance (salvation
by glorification).107 If in the Augustinian tradition man sins by a “malice”
without concomitant powerlessness or ignorance but by the simple pleasure
of sin (as in the theft of the pears),108 in the Irenaean tradition Adam falls or
stumbles “by accident” in a pedagogical—as opposed to juridical—model of
142 The Flesh
the Father: “He had pity on man who had welcomed disobedience by acci-
dent [neglegenter] and not by malice [male].”109 Without opposing the two
traditions too much, I would suggest that we ought to learn from Irenaeus
and the entire Greek tradition not to hang it all on a single sin as the locus
and cause of human salvation. At the dawn of the tempora christiana such
was not in fact the case. Such is proof that Christianity says more than that.
Yet the Latin tradition can teach us something else no less urgent for our
context today, namely, the act by which man is always taken up there where
he is (humanization of God), rather than called to become what he is not
yet (divinization of man). Thus says Augustine, relating his mother Monica’s
guidance: “It was not told to me that ‘where he is, there shall you be’ [ubi ille,
ibi et tu], but ‘where you are, there will he be also’ [sed: ubi tu, ibi et ille].”110
This movement of the “anthropomorphism of God” is every bit as profound
as the “theomorphosis of man”—as we will now see in Tertullian, who shows
in the solidity [consistance] of the flesh what Irenaeus first showed in its
visibility.
Chapter 5
The Solidity of the Flesh (Tertullian)
Passing from Irenaeus to Tertullian, we see a striking continuity. Their con-

texts are certainly different (the Greek and Latin worlds), but their ambitions
remain the same: to show that Christianity is essentially carnal, all the way
from its starting point, in the “Word made flesh” of the incarnation, to its
end, in the “flesh become Word” of the Resurrection. Even so, the emphasis is
displaced in the passing. If Irenaeus strives to disclose in Adam the visibility
of the flesh of humanity, Tertullian attempts to feel the weight of the flesh
of the incarnate Word in all its solidity and makes of his weight the defense
against all our attempts to angelize the Incarnation. If Irenaeus’s is a theo-
morphosis of man, in Tertullian we pass to an anthropomorphis of God: “We
have also published a volume on the Flesh of Christ, where we establish his
solidity [solidam] against any view of the unreality of his appearance.”1 This
commitment to the “solidity or density of the flesh” brings Tertullian so close
to us in our understanding of our own flesh and indeed our very humanity
“tout court.” In passing from the Smyrna of Irenaeus to the Carthage of
Tertullian, theology is burdened with a humanity become suffering and oner-
ous and makes the struggle against Docetism not only the occasion of the
manifestation of God in the flesh of man (Adam) but even more the locus of
the involvement of man in the flesh of God (Christ): “Tertullian, more a phi-
losopher in his approach, seeks to understand with the help of the Scriptures
what man is in his definitive constitution or his essential nature. In Irenaeus,
by contrast, the creation is accomplished only from the vantage of salvation.
The Creator never ceases perfecting man promised incorruptibility.”2
From here we can offer the necessary revision of the Greek adage from a
Latin perspective. The “glory of God is a living man” indeed, inasmuch (as Ire-
naeus taught us) as the formation of Adam as soul and body welcomes the Holy
Spirit into himself and thereby manifests the divine glory. But, let us say that (as
Tertullian will teach us) “the life of man is the vision of God” not only means
that to be man refers to the act of turning one’s gaze toward God (objective
genitive), but because to be God in view of man, in the mystery of the incarna-
tion, is a divine act done completely in order to espouse our flesh in its grandeur
as much as its misery (subjective genitive). The translucent quality of the flesh
143
144 The Flesh
of Adam in Irenaeus gives way to the density of the flesh of the incarnate Word
in Tertullian. These two hold different perspectives but share the same vision.
The “mixture and union” (commixtio and adunitio) of the soul and body inter-
laced with the Holy Spirit in Irenaeus is what announces the flesh as “sister of
Christ” (caro Christi sororem) in Tertullian. But the very same flesh, so glori-
fied in Irenaeus that it sanctifies Adam by way of the “perfect man” (perfectus
homo), becomes in Tertullian the place of a hyper-proximity and linking of
Christ to our pure and simple humanity: because “he who is so close to it [sibi
proximam] in so many ways loves the flesh [diliget carnem].”3 The glorification
of Adam in one thinker cedes to the humility of God in the next. Both are con-
cerned with the same earth (humus), but one that, if already fertile in Irenaeus,
is yet to be worked in Tertullian. From Smyrna to Carthage the task of making
resplendent becomes laborious. Here is a Christianity chronologically farther
from its source, but which nevertheless loses nothing ontologically by being
developed in this way. After the manifestation of God in his theophany (part I)
comes its progressive immersion in the flesh (part II). Here will come to birth a
new mode of relation to the other, by means of which each one will be singular-
ized and will respond to the call that is its own (part III).
From the Reduction of the Flesh to the Reduction to the Flesh

On the path of such an immersion in the flesh, Tertullian’s De carne Christi
is required reading. Far from any discussion about the soul of Christ, which
will of course greatly occupy the medievals later (for example, the quaestio
disputata De anima of Aquinas or the quaestiones disputatae De scientia
Christi of Bonaventure), here the debate is centered on the body. Tertullian
departs from Irenaeus inasmuch as everything unfolds as if the question of
the animation of Christ was already settled, though like Irenaeus, the Holy
Spirit (pneuma) is intertwined with mixture of soul and body. In other words,
the animation of the body no longer poses the problem. The principal agree-
ment in early Christianity that Christ is spiritual and in this close to the angels
demands that his uniqueness be found elsewhere, namely, in his corporeity,
even his quasi-organic “solidity.” “Everyone,” at least, that is, Tertullian and
the Gnostics, seem to agree on one point: Christ possesses a soul, which is
understood simply as a “spiritual reality” that constitutes his primary being.
But “certain people”—that is, one of them, namely, Tertullian—contest the
view that Christ’s spirituality constitutes the meaning of Christ’s revelation.
Even Irenaeus’s conception of the visibility of the flesh in Adam could still
draw Christian discourse toward a certain Docetism or angelism— even
though there is certainly no greater destroyer of the Gnostics than the author
of the Adversus Haereses, which was, indeed, otherwise entitled: “Denuncia-
tion and Refutation of Gnostics as Liars.” The solidity of the flesh, on the
contrary, is in Tertullian, such that the very question of the psychic is “brack-
eted” in a kind of epochê of the spiritual that has the effect of focusing the
The Solidity of the Flesh 145
debate on the physical or incarnate dimension. Here it is a question “only of

his flesh.” “We are examining the corporeal substance of the Lord [corpora-
lem substantiam domini]”: thus Tertullian describes the program of his De
carne Christi. He continues, “Everyone agrees about the spiritual substance
[de spiritali]. It is only a question of his flesh [caro quaeritur]. We will discuss
its reality [veritas] and its quality [qualitas], whether it preexisted [an fuerit],
its origin [unde] and its kind [cuiusmodi].”4
But there is more in the theologian from Carthage—and it is this that
makes his inquiry both theological and phenomenological. Tertullian in fact
does not remain satisfied with the sole reality (veritas) of the flesh of Christ.
Once the reality is admitted, it is necessary to extract the quality (qualitas).
In order to say it in other terms—and embarking here on a methodologi-
cal rapprochement with phenomenology—Tertullian sees not only the “quid
real” of Christ’s flesh but its “quomodo or how character” (Heidegger), in
the same way that the determination of meaning first orients the “object in
its how” (das Objekt im Wie), that is, in the “how of its modes of givenness”
(Husserl).5 It seems that it is not too much to say that the rhetorical structure
of existence (an), origin (unde), and mode (cuiusmodi) had already become
classical in the epoch of Tertullian (traces of it can be found in Quintillian
along with the numerous occurrences in Tertullian himself).6 Yet this rhetori-
cal structure will not be allowed to remain phenomenologically surrogate to
a meaning whose operation of the “reduction” itself already gives sufficient
witness to the impossibility of a substantializing reification of the flesh of
Christ: not only to pose the existence of the “bodily substance of the Lord”
(an), but even more to describe the genesis of its donation (unde) and the
modes of its givenness (cuiusmodi). Such a progression of meaning in real-
ity appears all the more decisive as it structures the De carne Christi and
at the same time designates each of its Gnostic adversaries as steps toward
the discovery of a reduced meaning of the incarnation of Christ (beyond
mere reification, but not less, to its appearance in a phenomenological sense):
“Those who attempt to undermine faith in the resurrection . . . divide into
pieces the flesh of Christ and either desire that it does not exist [aut nullam
omnino] or that it exists in a totally non-human mode [aut quoquo modo
aliam praeter humanam].”7
From the question of the existence of the flesh (whether it exists or not) to
its modality of appearing (whether a human or non-human mode) and pass-
ing through, as we will see, its genesis (whether from the earth or the stars),
the path that the De carne Christi takes seems to be phenomenological, lead-
ing indeed from the reduction of the flesh (the existence of which is suspended
only once accepted) to a reduction to the flesh (the donation of the flesh in
its mode of appearing). That the De resurrectione carnis (circa 211) closely
follows upon the De carne Christi (between 208 and 211) indicated well the
steps of such an anabasis, and consecrates each of his Gnostic adversaries
partners in the service of his thought: “The heretics have stumbled over his
146 The Flesh
flesh, pretending either that it had no reality [nullius veritas], as in Marcion

or Basilides, or that it had a proper quality [proprie qualitatis], as in the heirs
of Valentinus and according to Apelles.”8 From reality to its own quality—
these are the logical steps that authorize the renewal of the meaning from
quid to quomodo, from the reified existing thing to its modes of donation in
a specific appearance. Against such a regressive interpretation of being to the
appearance of the flesh of Christ, a naive and often patent realism in theology
sometimes wants to give a pretended primacy to the thing (“the material sub-
stance Christ incarnate”) over the pure and simple appearance of his being
in a flesh (in-carne)—as if by means of this contrast to prove that there was
something there “in flesh and bone” (given a non-phenomenological inter-
pretation this time!) called the Christ who had to prove his messianicity.9 If
it is true that Tertullian, against Marcion and Basilides, allows the existence
of a something there (quid), necessarily in “flesh and bone” of the person of
Christ, Tertullian nevertheless does not remain with this bare real and exist-
ing thing (das Ding), but he leads it back, now with Valentinus and Apelles
as interlocutors, to the sense of its “appearance for us” or the “thing itself”
(die Sache selbst). There is nothing to prohibit a reading something like a
suspended existence or reduction of the flesh of Christ in Tertullian—once
it is “naturally” established as such (a gesture which surely separates him
from phenomenology)—in order then to think something like its genesis and
modes of appearing in its donation to itself and to our own flesh.
In the justly polemical attempt of the “declension of the flesh,” moving
from the simple manifestation of its pure appearance (Valentinus) to the nec-
essary position of its nonexistence or fabrication (Marcion), it will be fitting
to let an “analytic of the incarnation” unfold, which, through a phenomeno-
logical recovery, will indicate how the mineness of my flesh (contra Marcion)
also requires that a necessary description of the flesh [chair] be achieved in
order for the body [corps] to be born in a non-identical way (contra Apelles),
which also appears in the economy of salvation (contra the disciples of Val-
entinus) and dies in the assumption of human finitude (contra Valentinus
himself). In this way alone the flesh of Christ is displayed for him as for us
(and for us by him), as his “most proper” property (proprietas generalis) and
the most connatural to ours.10 The central question of the De carne Christi,
as it reflects on the modality of the flesh of Christ insofar as it informs the
modality of our own flesh, is forcefully articulated in the following unique
formulation: “What sort of flesh [carnis qualitatem] can we and ought we
recognize in the Christ [debemus et possumus agnoscere in Christo]?”11
The Attempt at a Declension of the Flesh
In light of such a typology fixed by his adversaries, Tertullian establishes

that no human flesh received from man (ex homine sumptae) could be made,
“either of spirit” (non spiritalis) “or of soul” (nec animalis), “or of astral mat-
ter” (nec siderae), “or as an illusion” (nec imaginariae).12 Therefore, spiritual
or pneumatic flesh (Valentinus), soul-flesh or flesh-soul (Occidental disciples
of Valentinus), astral flesh (Apelles), and spectral or illusory flesh (Marcion)
are the forces that make it necessary to compose a declension of its diverse
modalities in order better to liberate, a contrario, the originality of Tertul-
lian’s own determination of the flesh. In the present enumeration Tertullian
implicitly inverts the scheme of declension (Valentinus [spirit], Valentinians
[soul], Apelles [astral matter], Marcion [mirage]) from the preceding order
prescribed by the questions posed (Marcion [quid], Apelles [unde], Valen-
tinus and the Valentinians [quomodo]) in order to unfold a hierarchy of
Gnostic heresies. This hierarchy commences with the most complex (Valen-
tinus), which gives free reign to a true appearance of the flesh, be it merely
spiritual or pneumatic, and descends little by little to the most simple or least
composite (Marcion), which purely and simply negates every appearance of
the flesh, or at least designates it as illusory. In order therefore to carve a
clear path into this lectio difficilior of the De carne Christi, it is best to fol-
low its author stride for stride and (analytically) descend with him from the
quomodo of the carnal appearance in its modality (Valentinus) to the unde of
its origin (Apelles) and the quid of its existence (Marcion). At a second step,
moving to the heart of a reading that will be all the “easier” as it follows the
logical order of the reduction, (synthetically) climbing up the path from the
existing thing (quid) to its modality (quomodo) in order to achieve, phenom-
enologically, the specificity of a flesh (of Christ), which is all the more human
as it is confessed a priori to be real and necessarily marked in advance by the
seal of life and death.
The Flesh in Its Modes of Appearance (Valentinus)

Spiritual or Pneumatic Flesh. As I have already emphasized, Valentinus, far
from negating any carnal existence in Christ, on the contrary attributes to
his corporeality a supreme dignity: his kind of flesh exists in “another mode
than the human” (quoquo modo aliam praeter humanam) or has a “unique
quality” (proprie qualitatis) and is consecrated thus both in its superiority
and its specificity. Unfolding from here is the famous Valentinian distinction
of the three degrees of carnal appearance inherited from a certain reading of
Saint Paul’s discourse on the resurrected body (1 Cor. 15:42–48), of which
the tripartition of carnal man divides all men into so many classes, according
to the levels of the divine pleroma: first, the “material or hylic” flesh (of the
pagans); second, the “animal or psychic” flesh (of Jews or the general faithful
of the Great Church); third, the “spiritual or pneumatic” flesh (of the initiates
to the perfect gnosis, and by essence the sole immortality).13 Tertullian com-
ments, not without irony: because “he wants to be made a flesh of a quality
not that of the human womb [quae non erat uoluae], Christ thus assumed a
148 The Flesh
spiritual flesh [caro spiritalis].”14 As we will see below, this “particular flesh”
has no other end than that of escape from ordinary flesh, the flesh of the
entire world, and, as Péguy says in his Dialogue de l’histoire et de l’âme
charnelle, from the “death of all the world, the common death, the death
of all men . . . that death of your father, my child, that which your mother
will also suffer one day, and your wife, your children, the children of your
children, your very self at the center.”15 The Son will thus only be born of the
Virgin as he receives his flesh, exceptionally, not “from” the human womb
(non ex uolua), but “in” the womb (in uolua), in the same way that God, for
example, only breathed a soul into a flesh—which alone comes from man.16
In being born the flesh of Christ remains outside of the conditions of birth
for ordinary humans—inasmuch as the flesh only always draws forth a flesh
of the same nature.
I therefore repeat the question: “What kind of flesh [carnis qualitatem] can
we and ought we to recognize in Christ [debemus et possumus agnoscere in
Christo]?”17 Does it suffice to attribute to him a “particular quality” (proprie
qualitatis) in order to render to his humanity, and ours through his, the dig-
nity which properly pertains to it? It is such a question which, posed to the
lived experience of Christ, will inform in return the specificities of our own
birth and death in the flesh. Without negating angelism, but rather bearing it
to full term, the Western Valentinians will emphasize so strongly the unity of
the soul-flesh that it will become, at least for them, difficult if not impossible
to distinguish the qualities that pertain to the soul, on the one hand, and the
flesh on the other.
Soul-Flesh or Flesh-Soul (Western Valentinians). According to the “disciples

of Valentinus,” Christ has so thoroughly wed himself to our human condi-
tion that his flesh itself would become soul or “soul-flesh” (animam carnem)
and his soul would become “flesh-soul” (carnem animam):18 “The flesh of
Christ is composed of soul because the soul became flesh [quod anima caro
sit facta]. Consequently the flesh itself is soul [caro anima], and just as the
flesh is made of soul [caro animalis], the soul is equally made of flesh [anima
carnalis].”19 A mode of manifestation of the soul by and in the flesh thus
presides over the indissoluble unity of the soul-flesh at every possible point.
Hence the Valentinians state: “In Christ the soul became body [corpus in
Christo] so that it is possible for us to see [quod sit uideremus] it being born,
die and, even more, resurrect.”20 Such a model, eminently phenomenological
in its description since it comes under the horizon of the manifestation of
the soul-flesh more than its existence, thus seems to bring to completion the
hypothesis of a real interaction of the soul and flesh, such that their epiphanic
community dominates over their simple ontic reality: “Because God desired
to render the soul visible to men [animam visibilem hominibus exhibere]
his soul became body [faciendo eam corpus].”21 The visibility of Christ in
his body witnesses then, not to the real or ontic existence of an incarnate
body, but first to a mode of being of his soul rendered visible in order to be
shown (exhibere) to men in the occurrence—that is, in being incarnate or in
“adopting” a flesh. Setting aside for the moment any danger of anachronism,
we would probably find realized, in the disciples of Valentinus and retrieved
in Tertullian, at least in part, Merleau-Ponty’s requisite of a “[thought of
the] flesh [not] starting from substances, from body and spirit—for then it
would be the union of contradictories—but we must think of it . . . as an
element, as a concrete emblem of a general manner of being.”22 Because the
soul, according to the Western Valentinians, has no other end but to be mani-
fest by a body, and the body, likewise, to show forth the soul, the manner of
being of the body manifests in reality the manner of its soul more than the
nature of their respective substances. Even more, the use of the term “body”
(corpus) by the Valentinian disciples, as in “the soul became body in Christ
[corpus in Christo],” instead of the “flesh” (caro), in order to indicate the
visibility of the invisible, could put us on the path toward finding a possible
distinction between “flesh” and “body” in the Valentinian corpus. Yet, as we
will see below, the non-employment of the flesh (caro), like Tertullian, only
gives more clear appearance to its concept of the body (corpus), all the more
melted into the soul (anima) as it hides a profound dualism under the cover
of an apparent monism. If “soul-flesh” first refers, for the Valentinians, to the
“soul-body,” this is probably because the Greek dualism of psuchê and sôma
is never inserted so well into theological language as when it negates the
specific novelty of the biblical sarx—or bâsâr in Hebrew—as the primordial
unity of human beings.
Uniting the soul and body in a theophanic model of appearance or mani-
festation thus leads to the recognition that these elements were, for a time
at least, unduly separated. But a question nevertheless remains, one that
Tertullian will never stop raising: What does the union of soul and flesh
(“soul-flesh”) mean for the “manifestation of the soul by the flesh” (ostensa
sit anima per carnem)? Said otherwise, if man, taken as a whole, belongs
to “life” (vita), is this a sufficient reason to reduce him to his soul, or to his
flesh, or to their confusion without distinction (as “soul-flesh”)? As De carne
Christi emphasizes, the soul is “naturally endowed with senses” (sensualis est
animae natura), in that it is expressed in and through the kinesthesis of the
body, without, however, fully being identified with it.23 As we will see below,
such will be the phenomenological meaning of a “manifestation (without
confusion or separation) of the flesh” attested by the theologian from Car-
thage in his confrontation with the Valentinians of the Occident. But first, let
us stick to the program of an enumeration of the adversaries of Tertullian,
now that the modes of appearance of the flesh (cuiusmodi) developed by
Valentinus (spiritual soul) and his disciples (soul-flesh) have been manifest,
and continue to move downstream—with the phenomenological interroga-
tion always on the horizon—toward the unde of the carnal origin of Christ
(Apelles) and the quid of his existence (Marcion).
150 The Flesh
The Flesh in Its Origin (Apelles)

Sidereal Flesh. Neither Valentinus nor his disciples have properly speak-
ing crossed out the act of “birth” from Christ’s flesh. If his flesh is in fact
born of a woman, nothing prohibits him from appearing for us according
to a particular mode of appearing which destroys nothing of his spiritual
nature or divine filiation. If Apelles no longer objects to the reality of the
flesh of Christ, he still definitively removes the “birth”: “The flesh is admit-
ted [admissa carne],” says Apelles, “but not its birth [natiuitatem negare].”24
The flesh of Christ is not born of flesh, for Apelles, but “it takes its flesh from
the stars and superior substances of the world” (de sideribus et substantiis
superioris).25 To look for such a genesis of the flesh of Christ—in its origin
and formation—is to draw it out from among the other bodies and superior
substances from whence it derives. That the flesh (caro) is considered born
from a body (corpus) or from superior substances (substantiae superiores)
requires a distinction (as we will see coming from an encounter with the
ambient Stoicism of the second century) between what pertains to the “flesh”
and what pertains to the “body.” The question is announced by Tertullian in
a magisterial fashion: “Where does his body come from [unde corpus] if his
body is not flesh [si non caro corpus]?”26
The Body of Flesh. This key question of the De carne Christi indicates at the
very least that the flesh is not identical to the body. Again, it is fitting at this
point to avoid a hasty rapprochement with the well-known phenomenologi-
cal distinction. Remaining aloof from a greatly anachronistic identification
of caro and Leib or corpus and Körper (Tertullian-Husserl), some analogies
nevertheless remain, as we will see below, since the being in flesh of Tertul-
lian, contra Apelles, is a being capable of specifically human kinestheses (the
“eating” of Christ before the tempter, his “drinking” before the Samaritan
woman, his “lament” upon hearing of the death of Lazarus, etc.). Being in
the flesh will no longer signify the state of “having” or “borrowing” a body.
The borrowed body, be it celestial, spiritual or soul-flesh, will be substituted
in Tertullian with a true “body of flesh,” which, far from being reduced to the
body, as we will soon see, on the contrary makes the theophanic appearance
of the flesh the very place of the soteriological redemption of the body. The
flesh is necessary. Such, according to Tertullian, his staunch adversary, is a
view that Marcion radically negates by virtue of an intransigent Docetism.
The Flesh in Its Existence (Marcion)

Spectral Flesh or the Mirage of the Flesh. We have seen that Marcion objects
to the reality (ueritas) of the flesh itself, thus retroceding the question of
its modality (cuiusmodi) and origin (unde) to that of its pure and simple
existence or nonexistence (an fuerit).27 If Christ had in reality no flesh, for
Marcion, he had nevertheless the appearance of the flesh. Further, precisely

because he only carried the appearance or likeness (dokein) of the flesh he
can teach those who are truly in the flesh how to be liberated. It would be
fitting to oppose to the crude Marcionite descriptions of the “phantasm”
(phantasma) of the flesh of Christ, especially “after his resurrection” (etiam
post resurrectionem) a certain mode of appearance, which, far from refusing
to posit any existence to the flesh of Christ, refuses on the contrary only to
confine it to this particular existentiality alone.28 It is still the case that such
an appearance of the flesh in Marcion thoroughly denies its reality (ueritas)—
not only as such, but in such a way that Christ himself was subjected in his
own body to it. Tertullian objects that the flesh assumed by Christ was first
“his own” (sua): “It is not very likely that he portrayed a spirit which was
his own [de spiritu quidem suo] and a flesh that was not [de carne uero non
sua].”29 This flesh that is his—let us hasten to add—is also immediately ours,
so that it may be a word that speaks and is addressed to us: “If it is not ours
[non nostram] that he has liberated . . . nothing in all this concerns us [nihil
ad nos], since it is not ours that he has liberated.”30 Speaking phenomenologi-
cally, the mineness of Christ’s flesh (Jemeinigkeit)31 always leads us back to
the mineness of our own flesh. Even as I am in fact always alone in living and
dwelling in my flesh, the carnal Christ proposes in his resurrection nothing
less than an “interlacing” or “intertwining” of flesh (Merleau-Ponty) so that
what he says of his own flesh (mineness) is identified with what I say of mine
(connaturality). Following Paul Claudel (in this sense the late progeny of
Tertullian), we can hold that “spirit alone does not speak to spirit, but flesh
which speaks to flesh,”32 and which leads us first to accept, contra Marcion,
that there was a true quiddity to the flesh of Christ—which seems to me at
least irreducible to his existentiality alone and is first disclosed in his exem-
plary phenomenality.
From Appearance to Solidity. From the spiritual flesh of Valentinus or the

soul-flesh of his disciples in its mode of appearing (cuiusmodi), to the sidereal
flesh of Apelles in its origin or genesis (unde) and the phantom or illusory
flesh of Marcion in its very inexistence (quid)—thus is declined Tertullian’s
Gnostic typology of the flesh which lacks “solidity” (solidam). On the con-
trary, and in complete connaturality with ours, the exemplary density of the
flesh of the Word in theology poses, today even more than yesterday, the
philosophical question of the meaning of an analytic of the incarnation: (a)
the status of an ordinary flesh, which, being born, would no longer die (the
spiritual flesh of Valentinus); (b) the mode of manifestation of the soul by the
flesh, which, by dint of the expression of one by the other, forgets their dis-
tinction (the soul-flesh of the Valentinian disciples); (c) the distinction of flesh
and body which prohibits deriving the flesh of Christ from a simple material
and corporal substance (the sidereal flesh of Apelles); (d) finally the mineness
of my own flesh, and the intertwining of my flesh with the flesh of the other,
152 The Flesh
which alone authorizes a common world of the flesh in contrast to the illu-
sory appearance of a Christ in a flesh even less “carnal” as it comes only to
teach me how to depart from my own (the phantom flesh of Marcion). The
task now is to climb back up the course of the river in order to rejoin the
double movement of reduction of the flesh and to the flesh of Christ. Here we
will see how astonishingly contemporary (via Moltmann) are the theologi-
cal accents that appear in taking this course: namely, a community of that
which is supported in the Son (in filio) and in his flesh (in carne) and that the
Father also suffers, in a Trinitarian way, with him (cum filio)—though in a
completely different, because not directly carnal, fashion. “The Spirit of God
does not suffer in his own name [suo nomine], for if suffering was possible in
the Son [si qui passus in filio possibile], it is necessary for the Father to suffer
with the Son [cum filio] in the flesh [in carne].”33
Toward an Analytic of the Incarnation
Christ had no other purpose in becoming incarnate than to assume our ordi-
nary flesh that exists wholly within the horizon of birth and death (contra
Valentinus) and of manifesting through it a salvation of the flesh rather than
of the soul alone (contra the Valentinians), but let us not forget to give to the
flesh a “real solidity” in its appropriation (contra Marcion) and to confer on
it its true genesis in its specificity relative to other bodies (contra Apelles).
Oneself as Another (contra Marcion)

Mineness of the Flesh. As we saw above, Marcion denies the existence of
Christ’s flesh, or at the very least objects to its true existence (ueritas) and
considers it to be only illusory and phantasmic (phantasma). Far from depict-
ing it in a trivial substantialism, the necessary affirmation of the reality of the
flesh of Christ, justifies, I suggest, the necessity of making a detour through
our own flesh in order to define the flesh of Christ himself. To say “the Word
was made flesh” (et uerbum caro factum est) is to recognize in the first place
that he became that which I am in my most originary and most proper being:
a being of flesh. In light of this let us read Tertullian’s harsh invective against
Marcion: “Marcion, you misunderstand this natural object of veneration [the
flesh and the path of childbirth]; yet how were you born [et quomodo natus
est]? You hate the birth of man; and then how do you love anyone at all [quo-
modo diligis aliquem]? You, in any case, can hardly be said to love yourself
[plane non amasti] when you withdraw yourself from the Church and faith
in Christ.”34 The virulence of the attack aside, Tertullian makes the quasi-
phenomenological insistence that Marcion pass by way of the experience of
his own birth in order to go even as far as loving himself in his own genera-
tion, and then Christ also in this very act. The rejection of birth is equivalent
to the hatred of oneself, since along with such a refusal is implicitly suggested
either regret for having been flesh or the preference for never having been.
In light of the failure of the Gnostics to love themselves and their own birth,
Tertullian will himself pass by the love of Christ for his own birth, in order
that, by him and with him, he can finally reach the point of loving himself:
“At least Christ [by contrast with Marcion] loves this man [dilexit hominem
illum], this clod formed in the womb among the refuse, this man coming into
the world by the passageway of the shameful organs, this man nourished in
the milieu of ridiculous caresses.”35
Interlacing of Flesh. To love “oneself as another” means to accept that one

must pass first by another in order to love oneself; his love for his own flesh
implicitly teaches me to cherish mine. At the heart of such a “transcendence in
immanence”—that is, the phenomenological and horizontal opening toward
the absolute other and the possible appropriation of his flesh (Husserl)36—
resides the truth of the love of the other’s flesh as well as my own flesh, which
requires first the recognition of their common genesis. Thus Tertullian says:
“One is not able to love a being [nihil amari potest] without at the same time
loving what causes it to be what it is [eo per quod est id quod est].”37 To
love myself in the flesh, and thus to assume it as specifically mine (sua) first
requires the attestation that another, in his own flesh, constitutes it before
I myself adopt it, or better, receive it. Only another, in his flesh and in an
“interlacing of flesh,” gives to me the world.38 So, in an exemplary way, we
can say that nothing is given to me apart from the recognition that it is by the
flesh of Christ alone that true access to the love of my own flesh is opened for
me. Against the later classical image of God in man conceived within the soul
alone—be it in the intelligible (Augustine) or affective (Bernard) dimension—
Tertullian designates the individual body as “loved of God” (dilexit a Deo),
and as the locus and trace of the image and likeness of God within. The
diversity of Christ’s own and my origins, either from heaven or from earth,
does not imply a “difference of material” (materiae differentia). The identity
of our carnal texture on the contrary indicates our common membership in
the same world created by God and received by men—the very one of whom
my body in its very passivity and (as we will soon see) filiality, always carries
the trace: “The first man was born of the dust of the earth, the second, of
heaven (1 Cor. 15:47). Yet the text does not envisage a difference of material
(non tamen ad materiae differentiam spectat): to the old, carnal substance of
the first man, Adam, who was merely terrestrial, it opposes the celestial sub-
stance of the second man, Christ, who comes from the Spirit.”39
Thus the analytic of the flesh, or better, of the flesh of Christ as it reveals
my own flesh, shows how, against every expectation, this caro—however
denigrated in certain regions of Latin Christianity (excepting of course
Tertullian)—constitutes me precisely and paradoxically as the image and
likeness of God. The Word was made flesh; it is in his flesh therefore that first
154 The Flesh
resides the secret of the love of my own flesh. It would be necessary then to
accept this genesis: in order to be distinguished from my own a flesh came not
from the heavens (or rather the stars), but was rather drawn from the earth
or soil (adâmâ)—at least inasmuch as it rightly links up with my own that
remains in Adam, the first man, who was also drawn from the earth (Gen.
2:7).
My Sister the Flesh (contra Apelles). The flesh “accepted” [admise], and as
suspended in its very admittance [admission] (even though it is not totally
reduced in the necessary presupposition of its existence, contra Marcion): it
is fitting to retrace its origin or mode of provenance (unde), which specifies it
by relation to the body (or bodies). As we have already seen, Apelles draws
the flesh of Christ (caro) from the celestial bodies (corpus). The Gnostic élan
of Apelles borrows here from a well-known Stoicism. And in order precisely
to exempt the flesh of Christ from ordinary corporeity he somehow folds
back the human body over the totality of material corporeity from which
the cosmos is received. To the key question, “Where did his body come from
[unde corpus] if his body was not flesh [si non caro corpus]?”40 Tertullian
offers a vigorous response that turns on a near-phenomenological distinction
between “flesh” and “body”: namely, that the flesh is not body inasmuch as
it always assumes attitudes or corporeal movements (kinestheses) that are
proper to it and therefore does not yield itself to being characterized as a
celestial substance, whether angelic or astral: “Why call it celestial flesh [cae-
lestem carnem] if nothing about it lends itself to being interpreted as celestial?
Why deny that it was terrestrial [terrenam] if you have good cause to recog-
nize it as terrestrial? He was hungry [esuriit] in the presence of the devil, and
thirsted [sitiit] in the presence of the Samaritan woman; he wept [lacrimatus
est] over Lazarus and trembled [trepidat] before death, saying, ‘The flesh is
weak [caro infirma],’ and, to boot, he pours out his blood [sanguinem fun-
dit]. Behold all these indications of a celestial origin!”41 The kinesthesis of
the body and the esthesiology of the living are really the same thing: (a) the
movements of his body make it appear to us as flesh, (b) and therefore as a
living being experiencing itself.
Kinesthesia of the Body and Esthesiology of the Living. (a) Eating and
drinking in the presence of another (be it the devil or a Samaritan woman),
weeping over a deceased friend (Lazarus), trembling at the approach of his
own death, experiencing the weakness of his flesh and pouring out his own
blood: is there not there something much more than the simple substantial-
ization of a body among other (celestial) bodies, joining together a certain
number of kinestheses that are human and terrestrial, and which make of
Christ in the flesh the premise and the model of the first man drawn from the
earth (adâmâ)? Does not the “I can” of Christ’s flesh described by the move-
ments of his body according to the near-phenomenological interpretation of
De carne Christi actually precede the intentionality of his I think?42 The sen-
sory lived experiences of his body (Erleibnisse) noted above (refusing to eat
in the presence of the devil, requesting a drink from the Samaritan woman,
weeping for his deceased friend, etc.) incarnate his body in the flesh (es wird
Leib), inasmuch as by means of them, he constitutes the world.43 There is
likely no spatiality for Christ beyond the progressive constitution of his flesh
throughout his terrestrial pilgrimage and which could never testify to any
“astral corporeity” (Apelles). Further, the world regenerated by his resurrec-
tion is properly speaking nothing but that which he reconstitutes in a new
and strange way by his resurrected flesh in its diverse kinestheses of the body
(for example, “appearing in their midst” even through locked doors; in giving
himself to “be seen” and eventually “touched” by Thomas—even the marks
of the nails and the wound of the lance; in desiring “something to eat” when
he was with his disciples on the shore of the Tiberian sea, etc. [Jn. 20–21]).
The “history come to earth” when God became man is also “a history come in
the flesh”—to quote Péguy—precisely because there is no divine historicity at
all, according to Christianity, outside of this “enfleshment” which constitutes
him even to the point of a pure adequation of himself to the mode of being
of his single corporeity: “This is my body” (hoc est enim corpus meum).44
(b) These sensorial lived experiences of his body, which are the means of
his appearing in the flesh, are also revealed in an exemplary and unique way
in Tertullian’s analogy between the “composite of the flesh” and “life of the
earth”: “muscles [musculos] similar to mounds of dirt, bones [ossa] similar
to rocks and even hillocks and gravel, the interlacing of nerves [nervorum
tenaces conexus] like forking roots, the branching network of veins [vena-
rum ramosos] like winding streams, the downy fuzz [lanuguines] like moss,
hair [comam] like grass, and the hidden treasure of marrow [medullarum in
abdito thesauros] like ores of the flesh [ut metalla carnis].”45 One would be
wrong to see in this “terrestrial origin” (terrenae originis) of all flesh—and
therefore in Christ as well (et in Christo fuerunt)46—only the naive portrait
of a simple reified metaphor of human corporeity. The composition of the
body in muscles, bone, nerves, veins, and so on corresponds to the living and
moving and gestating earth (mounds of dirt, rocks with gravel, forking roots,
winding streams, etc.). Extending the phenomenological metaphor, the “life”
of the body (Leben) constitutes Christ in the “flesh” (Leib). The lived body or
body proper, the “flesh” (caro in Tertullian and Leib in Husserl)—ignoring,
here, all danger of anachronism—far from designating merely the pure and
simple material reality of something (corpus or Körper), be it even of celestial
or astral origins, actually designates in Tertullian the very organicity of a
specifically human body. And it does so in a double sense: on the one hand,
it is disclosed capable of kinestheses proper to it and which constitute it in
its original and specifically human “I can” (eating and drinking in the pres-
ence of another, weeping, etc.). On the other hand, the analogies of the body
immediately point back to the metaphors of the life of the earth (mounds
156 The Flesh
of dirt, rocks with gravel, forking roots, winding streams, etc.). As Husserl
points out, “[Being related] ‘through the living body’ (leiblich) clearly does
not mean [being related] ‘as a physical body’ (körperlich); rather, the expres-
sion refers to the kinesthetic, to functioning as an ego in this peculiar way,
primarily through seeing, hearing, etc., and of course other modes of the ego
belong to this (for example, lifting, carrying, pushing, and the like).”47
For Tertullian, being the flesh (caro), as in Husserl later, reveals the life of
the body (Leib): the collection of these “signs” (signa) carnally constitutes
Christ (muscle, bone, nerve, veins, etc.), “hiding the Son of God all the more
in him [dei filium celaverunt] as he had no other reason for being taken sim-
ply for another man than to show [extantem] the human reality of a body.”48
The act of showing the “human substance of the body” (humana substantia
corporis) is definitively what constitutes the “flesh” (De carne Christi). If the
muscles, bones, nerves, and veins make up the body (corpus), just like other
bodies or substances, these corporeal elements are given in Christ’s flesh as
well since by them he experiences in himself diverse kinestheses by virtue of
which he constitutes the world (eating, drinking, weeping, etc.). The two rai-
sons d’être of the flesh of Christ, according to the De carne Christi, namely,
the kinesthesis and the esthesiology of the living, are therefore founded on
one, since that which reveals his movement to us (kinesthesis) is at the same
time that which attests to him as living (blood in his veins, the interlacing of
nerves, etc.).
Flesh and Body. It is more than fitting, then—for Christ in an exemplary

fashion and then for us through him—not only to be in the flesh through
the experience of the body (objective), but even to love his body through
experiencing it as flesh (subjective or phenomenological body). As we have
already seen, contra Marcion, the love of the body, in an ultimate and prob-
ably uniquely Christian way, consecrates it as flesh. The flesh (caro) is now
the “sister of Christ” (Christi sororem) as in the striking formula of De res-
urrectione carnis, inasmuch as “Christ loves the flesh [diliget carnem] which
is so close to him in so many ways [tot modis sibi proximam].”49 (i) The
proximity of the body to oneself (sibi proximam), or in other words the
impossibility of unstitching that which ties me to my skin, is precisely what
makes it flesh. Paradoxically, from Tertullian to Husserl, the body, as “physi-
cal thing” (Körper) composed of bones, veins, nerves, and so on “becomes
flesh” (es wird Leib) since it is aware—or better said—feels. Thus the same
goes for the inevitable chiasm of the touching-touched (Husserl)50 or from
the experience of the Son auto-affecting himself in his body (“being hungry”
[esuriit], “feeling thirst” [sitiit], “weeping” [lacrimatus est], etc.). (ii) Further,
Christ’s “love of the flesh” (diliget carnem)—and his own in the first place,
which is “so close to him in many ways” (tot modis sibi proximam)—thus
makes of his ordinary corporeity a unique mode of filiality. The flesh, as his
“sister” (soror), his flesh, is passively recognized and received in a Trinitarian
way from the same origin: his Father. In the same way as all flesh, the flesh
as “sister of Christ” therefore never gives itself to itself but always receives
itself from another. The auto-affection of the flesh is attested immediately
and directly in Christ as an auto-affection desiring and loving what I am and
what he is in himself.
The “charity of my flesh” makes of my own body the place of the most
intimate fraternity. Here we are very far removed indeed from the Gnostic
disgust at the heart of Marcion’s illusory flesh or of Apelles’s sidereal flesh as
well toward that which constitutes my body in its most trivial of activities
(childbirth, drinking and eating, weeping, etc.). We are also at the antipodes
of the thinly veiled dualism hiding under the apparent monism of the dis-
ciples of Valentinus’s soul-flesh. Here the flesh manifests my life (vita) more
than my soul (anima), just as Christ did in giving himself. Thus it is neces-
sary to look on the flesh of Christ not only as it is manifest in the mode of
a theophany, but even as it recapitulates and saves by means of this very
manifestation of life in it, which is, soteriologically speaking, within the com-
petence of the flesh.
The Manifesto of the Flesh (Contra the Valentinians)

The soul is seen so much through the flesh, as I indicated above, in the con-
text of Tertullian’s exposition of the soul-flesh, that the Valentinian disciples
failed to distinguish what belongs to the soul and what belongs to the flesh.
In Tertullian the truth of the manifestation of the Christic flesh in its modality
(cuiusmodi) is revealed in a completely different way. More than merely the
soul (anima), Christ first shows life (vita) in his flesh, and by way of an excess,
saves the soul in saving the flesh, for surely the Hellenizing dualism of psuchê
/sôma is very far removed from the biblical conception of man as sarx: “The
‘life was manifested’ [vita manifesta est]” [Jn. 1:4; 2 Cor. 4:10] and not the
soul [non anima]. Or again, “‘I have come to save the soul’ [animam saluam
facere] [Lk. 9:56]. Christ did not say ‘to show it’ [non dixit ostendere].”51 The
purpose is clear: (a) in theophanic perspective: the flesh of Christ manifests
his life more than his soul; (b) in soteriological perspective: more than merely
showing it, this same flesh saves the soul.
Theophanic Flesh. (a) The “manifested life” (vita manifesta est) is cashed
out first in Tertullian, likely in reaction to the absolute monism of the disci-
ples of Valentinus with its (implicit) total separation of soul and flesh—itself
close indeed to the Nestorianism that will later become such a great object
of reproach (e.g., in the controversy between Leo the Great and the Greek
fathers of the Council of Chalcedon).52 “As far as Christ is concerned,”
emphasizes Tertullian, “we find his soul and his flesh designated by direct
and clear-cut terms: his soul is designated as soul [animam animam] and his
flesh as flesh [et carnem carnem]. There is no trace of a flesh-soul [animam
158 The Flesh
carnem] or soul-flesh [aut carnem animam].”53 Rather everything is purely

tautological: “The soul is soul” (animam animam) and “the flesh is flesh”
(carnem carnem). Does our hypothesis, then, of an analytic of the incarnation
at the heart of De carne Christi find itself nearly ruined, at the precise point
where no bridge or chiasm between the soul and the flesh seems any longer
possible? It is it then appropriate to conclude, in regard to such formulas,
that Tertullian holds to a pure, dualizing substantialism of the flesh and soul,
which is, in a word, very far from the neat analyses of the “flesh-soul” and
the “soul-flesh” of the Valentinians? To draw such a hasty conclusion seems
to ignore precisely the soul and flesh themselves, since they are in themselves
related to each other. Tertullian’s apparent dualism (of flesh/soul or of soul/
flesh) is in fact established only in relation to the complete monism of the
Valentinians. In the midst of his polemic, Tertullian puts in operation a quasi-
r eduction (epochê) of the soul and flesh, which lets a third term appear: life
(vita). “We are ready to admit now [nunc] that the soul has been manifested
by the flesh [ostensa sit anima per carnem].”54 “Now,” that is, once the mas-
sive confusion has been forestalled between flesh and soul where the soul is
lost in the soul-flesh and the flesh is lost in the flesh-soul.
Therefore for Tertullian the soul is what is “here manifested by the flesh”
(ostensa per carnem) provided that it reveals what Christ carried in his life,
even more than the flesh: “Behold why the Son descended and was imbued
with a soul [animam subiit].”55 Note here that Tertullian implicates the soul
rather than the flesh, which he paradoxically passes over. Like the first Adam,
Christ from all eternity bore, at least in a precursory way, in himself the
body or earth. This is a strange but apposite reversal. Of course, what also
must be seen here in such a “prototype” is that it be animated or “imbued
with a soul” in a flesh, precisely in order to be joined by the movements
of its body (life of the muscles, tension of the nerves, etc.) with that which
man experiences in his flesh, such as the diverse sensory and incarnate lived
experiences that are proper to it and by which it constitutes the world (eating
and drinking in the presence of another, lamenting the absence of a friend,
etc.). There is in other words no veritable incarnation without a complete
animation or “experience” [épreuve] of the body, which transmutes it into
flesh by means of its diverse kinestheses. We are very far removed from the
numerous Platonizing conceptions of the incarnation as “putting on flesh” of
a soul (in carne) or even its “putting on the death” of the body (sôma-semâ).
In Tertullian by contrast the soul animates a body and takes on flesh. Here we
suggest that the phenomenological conception of incarnation is discovered,
which, far from finding itself anchored in the Valentinian monism of soul-
fl
esh, on the contrary makes of the “manifestation of the soul by the flesh”
(ostensa anima per carnem) a specifically human way of inhabiting the body
in order to finally “become flesh” or be incarnate (es wird Leib).56 And if in
being “manifested by the flesh” the soul is discovered animating a body, it is
also the case that what is revealed in Christ’s life is also revealed in my own
to the end that he is known in me rather than it is that I am known in him:

“The Son descended and was imbued with a soul in order to teach the soul
not to know itself in Christ [non ut ipsa se anima cognosceret in Christo] but
to know Christ within it [se ut Christum in semetipsa].”57
In advance of and in contrast to all Hellenizing theologies that replace
man’s self-
knowledge for the image and likeness of God in man (from
Augustine to Aquinas, for example), Tertullian requires that we pass—in
the double sense of the word, as a passage and as a surpassing—from the
knowledge of the self in God to the knowledge of God in the self. Thus
the famous Pauline formula—“It is not I who live but Christ lives within
me” (Gal. 2:20)—ordinarily interpreted egologically, should, in light of De
carne Christi, be first understood Christologically. This recommendation of
the Apostle, not only indicating the place of the passive constitution of the
subject and one’s access to the self by the mediation of another in me (me/
Christ), also above all indicates the complete auto-manifestation of another
“life” in me, from the moment that I accept its initial act of decentering me
from myself: “He is imbued with a soul in order to teach the soul to know
Christ within it [ut Christum cognosceret in semetipsa].”58
While I know myself in God through the mediation of Christ (according
to the egological interpretation), it is no less the case that I first know God in
me in knowing Christ as my very life (according to the Christological inter-
pretation).59 It is no longer simply the soul that “is manifested by the flesh of
Christ” (ostensa per carnem)—may the contemporary disciples of Valentinus
and the numerous Hellenizing theologians please pardon my offense—but
the very life of God, inasmuch as it constitutes his being, woven from his
glorious flesh, and that which I encounter in my mortal flesh: “vita manifesta
est, non anima.”60 The theophany of the flesh of Christ ecstatically gives the
life of God in man more than it lets the soul appear to the self in an egologi-
cally focused way. What is the nature of this “manifested life”? Simply put, it
is that which reveals the theophanic flesh of Christ—and it is manifested first
in a soteriological manner. As we have already quoted above: “ ‘I have come
in order to save the soul’ [animam saluam facere] [Lk. 9:56], Christ did not
say, ‘in order to show it’ [non dixit ostendere].”61
Soteriological Flesh. (b) In what sense does the soul need saving, if Christ
“bore the burden” (animam subiit) in his flesh through experiencing it in
a body? It needs saving because, simply, along with the flesh (cum carne),
it composes the whole human being: “We surely do not know the soul res-
urrected with the flesh [cum carne]. Behold what Christ has manifested
[manifestauit].”62 The theophany of the soul by the flesh—that which Christ
has manifested—is a deliberate expression of soteriology—that which Christ
has saved, namely, the flesh with the soul. This chiasm of flesh and soul (the
manifestation of the soul by the flesh and the salvation of the flesh with the
soul), very far indeed from the unilateral monism of the Valentinians, means
160 The Flesh
that nothing happens to the soul which is not also in some way produced
in the flesh, be it in a completely other mode. Tertullian discovers here, in
a striking way, the implacable analogy between the senses of the soul and
the experience of the flesh and thus anticipates the very famous and fecund
doctrine of the spiritual senses (which we will seek to understand in chap. 6
with Bonaventure): “I consider the soul to be naturally endowed with senses
[sensualis est anima natura]. This is so true that no part of the soul is lacking
in sensation [nihil animale sine sensu] and thus nothing that is endowed with
sensation at all lacks soul [nihil sensuale sine anima].”63 Because the soul
immediately experiences its organic flesh or its own body in that it is natu-
rally endowed with senses (sensualis est anima natura), it is thus known, or
better, is recognized, and suffers or is aware of itself [se re(s)-sent elle-même]
in its body. Whoever is fond of going into ecstasies or distancing themselves
from the “knowledge [cognosceret] of the self that pertains to the soul”64 (as
for the Valentinian disciples and Hellenizing theologies), is negligent since
“from the beginning the soul has received the feeling of itself [ipsa sensum sui
ab initio].”65 The soul “feels” (ipsa sensum) or experiences itself, without dis-
tance, precisely in its own flesh. It “auto-affects,” to speak in Michel Henry’s
terms, who uses it in direct reference to the author of De carne Christi.66
However, the experience of the self loses nothing of its “density” or
“solidity.” Here Tertullian makes an a posteriori break with Henry the
phenomenologist and the reading that he proposes. For Tertullian it is not
enough to experience oneself “in life and through life” in order to be in the
flesh. Through the encounter with all the Gnostic schools, Tertullian asserts
that life itself is only given if a “body,” made of “muscles,” “bones,” “nerves,”
and “veins,” constitutes and supports it in its exteriority as well as in its
very materiality. There is no “flesh without body” (and here he paradoxically
courts the inverse risk of falling into an ethereal angelism that he works to
condemn). Yet it is true that the definition of “Life” as “auto-revelation of
the self” (Henry) is already discovered in Tertullian. It is necessary, however,
to unite such a conception directly with the “density” and “solidity” of the
flesh (solidam carnem). For in the general project of salvation there is not
only life to be manifested (uita manifesta est non anima), but there is also
the soul to be redeemed (ueni animam saluam facere, non dixit ostendere).67
Theophany and soteriology are ultimately tied together in the resurrected
flesh. The manifestation of the flesh is at the service of the salvation of the
soul (and the flesh along with it). Tertullian’s perspective is here soteriological
and it assumes the whole of humanity that the lone phenomenological auto-
affection wrongly forgets: “The flesh is washed in order for the soul to be
purified; the flesh receives the unction in order for the soul to be consecrated;
the flesh is marked with a sign in order for the soul to be protected; the flesh
is covered by the imposition of hands in order for the soul to be illuminated
by the spirit; the flesh is nourished with the body and blood of Christ in order
for the soul to feed on the power of God.”68
My flesh interlaced with the flesh of another (contra Marcion), an organic

flesh in the experience of the kinestheses of its own body (contra Apelles),
a theophanic flesh in the soteriological goal of its resurrection (contra the
Valentinians): it is this flesh that is a flesh for the sake of being born (as we
have already said) and, as we will now see, is a flesh for the sake of dying
(contra Valentinus himself). In this way will a new path for a metaphysics of
finitude open before us, all the more hidden in the kenosis of the cross as it is
anchored first in the “kenosis of the flesh.”
The Hypothesis of a Flesh for the Sake of Death (contra Valentinus)

A Flesh Made to Be Born, a Flesh Made to Die. Valentinus does not reject
the possibility of a birth for flesh. Nevertheless, he objects to its properly
carnal composition, in the sense that whatever is born in the flesh or “in the
womb” (in uolua) is not identically born of the flesh or “from the womb”
(non ex uolua).69 One must surrender to the evidence: a body “agglutinated”
(adglutinatur) to another body, either from the exterior (extraneo) or in the
womb (in uolua), produces along with it a veritable “community of flesh
and entrails [concarnatur et conuisceratur].”70 One could return to Psalm
22:10 (“you have knit me together in my mother’s womb,” ex utero matris
meae) and find there certain aspects of the Irenaean plasma, yet it would still
be necessary to suppose that what has been knit together “attached to the
womb” (adhaesit utero).71 Beyond the literality of the argument (less glorious
if also more realist than the Irenaean line), it is fitting to note the specifically
phenomenological pertinence of the doctrine. The weaving together of flesh
in childbirth is such that not only love of another for the sake of his own flesh
and for mine leads also to value it in my own birth. But, even more, the act
of birth marks for both of us such a great tear within our carnal community
that it signals at the same time for both of us a community of nature (the
flesh)—even a community of world (in the perception of space constituted by
the flesh). More than a simple substance or some material, the interweaving
or chiasm of the flesh of the other with my own (Merleau-Ponty) from birth
ratifies a common human belonging to the world: “hence the Word was made
flesh” (uerbum caro ex uolua factum est).72 The hypothesis of a birth carnal
in origin (recognized by Valentinus) necessarily implies a community of flesh
in texture and in end (as Tertullian suggests). Thus goes the rustic formula of
Boehme commented on by Heidegger: “As soon as a human being is born,
he is old enough to die right away.”73 The triviality of the proposition aside,
it is enough to note that it recalls something that Tertullian even applied to
the Word himself: “Christ, sent to die [mori missus], had to be born in order
to die [nasci quoque necessario habuit ut mori posset]. In fact, nothing dies
except that which is born [non enim mori solet nisi quod nascitur].”74
The ordinary insistence of Western theology on death as the means of the
Son’s act of redemption (death for our sins) often makes us forget his death
162 The Flesh
by communion (death of being born—that is, through having espoused our

corruptible flesh and submitted to the ordinary law of the self’s destruction).
In being born his flesh is immediately a dying flesh. We can therefore hold this
with the highest degree of certitude (sum moribundus): “The rule of death
was the reason for his birth [forma moriendi causa nascendi est] . . . Christ
became death for the sake of that which is submitted to death by reason
of its birth [quia nascitur, moritur].”75 Further, this flesh that dies renders
him truly carnal (acceperit carnem) as he espouses it through the path of
birth (nascendo). This position therefore cedes nothing to a pure angelic or
Gnostic appearance: “Both Christ and the angels appeared in the flesh [in
carne processerint]. Yet no angel ever descended in order to be crucified [ut
crucifigeretur], to know death [ut mortem experiretur], and to be resurrected
[ut a morte suscitaretur]. Never has an angel had such reasons to take a body
[angelorum corporandorum] and such is the reason why they were never
incarnate [non acceperit carnem] by the path of birth [nascendo]: not coming
in order to die [non venerant mori], they did not come through being born
[ideo nec nasci].”76
As we will later see in Thomas Aquinas (chap. 8), the angelic incorpora-
tion (angelorum corporandorum) is distinguished from the incarnation of
Christ (acceperit carnem) in that the carnal angelic appearance—which it
shares with Christ (in carne processerint)—neither submits to the law of the
genesis of the flesh “by birth” (nascendo) nor to its disappearance by being
subject to “the experience of death” (ut morteum experiretur). The truth of
the incarnation of Christ is therefore first, not merely the carnal appearance
(Leiblichkeit), which it shares with the angels, but first its paradoxical corpo-
reity (Körperlichkeit) as an “object of the world,” subject to the ordinary law
of birth and death, which is precisely that which the angel has never attained
in its purely apparent flesh. The complexity of a phenomenological reading
of the incarnation of Christ therefore no longer merely concerns the appear-
ance of the angel more than the being of man, as Christ become flesh (caro)
by the diverse kinestheses of his body (corpus). Rather the complexity lies
now in that he could remain body (corpus) as an object in the world subject
to life and death even though he pursued no other end than of showing his
flesh (caro) as the place of the shining forth of the divine glory. In this he is
like the angels without being reduced to one. Rather than merely extolling
his becoming the flesh of man (Verleiblichung) through a simple series of
phenomenological reductions, let us also attempt, still following Husserl, to
think through the enigma of his becoming body (Verkörperung), that is, his
being in the world as a simple object of the world: “Elucidating how the flesh
[Leib] is constituted as a physical flesh [Leibkörper] is therefore a fundamen-
tal problem that needs to be thought through starting from the foundation.”77
Christ’s flesh becomes or becomes again his body as soon as he comes in the
flesh “in order (there) to die” (ut mori posset) as much as “in order (there)
to be born” (nasci quoque necessario).78 His “flesh toward birth” is at the
same time a “flesh toward death.” The implied Heideggerian interpretation

here no longer lacks the necessary incarnation of anguish in the flesh.79 If the
soul is manifested in a flesh provided that it implements the kinestheses of its
body and finds there along with it its salvation, then it experiences in its flesh
precisely the double sentiment of the emptiness of its own existence as well
as the call from the divine or its own self-entrusting to the divine. Thus Ter-
tullian, with a surprisingly modern outlook, states: “Before learning anything
about God the soul names God. Without knowing the outcome, it says that
it commends its cause to God [deo commandare se dicit]. It understands only
these words: ‘There is no hope after death’ [spem nullam esse post mortem],
and yet it still makes vows for and imprecations upon those who are no more
[et bene et male defuncto cuique imprecatur].”80
The Cadaver. The flesh toward death (ut mori) is marked as the place of a
vocation toward God, even of a call of God. Said otherwise, the knowledge
that I am going to die and therefore lose, at least in a terrestrial fashion, the
ensemble of kinestheses which constitute my flesh (eating, drinking, weeping,
etc.), establishes the lived experience of my body as the site of a claim to my
entire being: experiencing to the end the feeling of a total “absence of hope
after death” (spem nulam esse post mortem), the soul, manifested in its flesh
and saved along with it (cum carne), has not ceased “to commend its cause to
God” and “to make vows for and imprecations upon those who are no more.”
In an expected synonymy established in De resurrectione carnis (which could
also be named De resurrectione mortuorum here) the “word flesh (id est
carnis) thus designates the same word as death” [eadem erit et in nomine
mortui]. The flesh does not only die here in order to deliver the soul (as in a
Platonic perspective) but reveals at once that by which I fall into the empti-
ness of death (cadere) and that in which I rise in the hope of the resurrection
(resurrectio carnis): “Truly the flesh [adeo caro est] is wearied by death, for
it is from this word fall, cadere, that it is called cadaver [cadaver] . . . Even
as the resurrection truly concerns a transitory [caduc] element [caducae rei
est], namely the flesh [id est carnis], that very word designates the word death
[eadem erit et in nomine mortui] since what we call the resurrection of the
dead is the resurrection of a transitory [caduc] being [quia caducae rei est
resurrectio quae dicitur mortuorum].”81
It is needless to say that we know not to hold with the Gnostics and Mar-
cion in particular that Christ has not endured the agony of his passion by
virtue of being “a phantasm too empty to feel [quia ut phantasma uacabat a
sensu earum].”82 On the contrary, his flesh that adhered to the womb from
whence it came in birth (ex uolua) is now “glued” to itself and even to its
own death. Like all men, the Son of Man “falls” in some sense into his own
demise (cadere) and, in his “transitory” [caduque] flesh or “cadaver,” disap-
pears. Let it suffice here to see how the mineness of his flesh in its suffering
(Jemeinigkeit) joins up with the mineness of my own flesh: “A flesh like ours,
164 The Flesh
supplied by blood, structured by bones, interlaced with nerves, crisscrossed

by veins . . . this flesh was born to die [nasci et mori] and was human beyond
any doubt [humana sine dubio] since it came from man [ut nata de homine]
and was mortal for this reason [ideoque mortalis]. This flesh in Christ will be
man and Son of Man.”83 To say of the “death of the Son of God” (et mortuus
est dei filius) that it ought to be believed because it is absurd (credibile est
quia ineptum est),84—the most famous if also most misunderstood phrase of
Tertullian—does nothing to respond either to the false accusations of irratio-
nalism of the credo quia absurdum so denigrated in the Middle Ages or to the
relishing of the death of God theologies in the exemplary nonsense of the so-
called death of God that saturates contemporary consciousness’s awareness
of the absurdity of the world.85 To elevate the absurd or foolish character of
the death of the Son properly on the contrary consists in recognizing that
dying for us he no less dies as one of us—that is, with us in the texture of our
own flesh, subject to the natural law of corruptibility and death. If there is an
anguish of the Son before his own death, it will not be an anguish “of sin,”
but rather one “of finitude,” for he died not only from taking on himself our
sins, but first, in an exemplary and quotidian way, from espousing himself to
our very flesh.86
The Kenosis of the Flesh. It is not enough, according to Tertullian, that

Christ “carry the cross” (crucem gestare). It is first necessary that he “carry
the flesh” (carnem gestare). “What is more unworthy of God that he should
blush: birth [nasci] or death [an mori]? Carrying the flesh (carnem gestare)
or the cross (an crucem)? Being circumcised or nailed? Being fed or buried?
Being tucked in a crib or deposed in a tomb?”87 The kenosis of Christ is
therefore first anchored in the kenosis of his flesh: “The first meaning of ‘the
Word became flesh’ is quite straightforward: word, this particular form of
personal utterance, known to everyone, takes on a form of being which, as
such, is foreign to the word, for flesh as such does not speak. Even if ‘flesh’
here stands for ‘man,’ speaking is only one of the forms of activity of the
being ‘man’ ” (Balthasar).88
Both the newborn in Bethlehem and the crucified man on Golgotha lack
speech. Only the flesh speaks here. Put precisely, that which speaks has no
knowledge. Or: “Its beginning is the pure—and, so to speak, still dumb—
psychological experience, which now must be made to utter its own sense
without adulteration” (Husserl).89 The history “come to earth” when God
became man is also, as we have already seen, a “history come to the flesh”
(Péguy). If it thus seems to the phenomenologist (Heidegger) that “the essence
of the divinity is closer to us than what is so alien in other living creatures,”
the theologian of the Christic incarnation teaches, following Tertullian, that
the (Trinitarian) essence of God becomes even closer as soon as this same
divine is made living and corporeal and manifests himself as such.90 “Caro
salutis cordo est”—“the flesh is the hinge of salvation”:91 in this movement of

the hinge (of salvation) or around this joint, is found the key to opening up a
fecund and non-polemical confrontation, ever renewed and never achieved,
between phenomenology (the overcoming of metaphysics by the analytic of
the flesh) and theology (the redemption and recapitulation of our own flesh
by the flesh of Christ).
It is this “very flesh,” rendered fully visible and glorious in Adam (Ire-
naeus) and finding all its solidity in the incarnate Word (Tertullian), that is
necessary for us now ourselves to assume, or rather, to convert. Both the “ark
of flesh” of the first Adam (Irenaeus) and the “kenosis of the flesh” of the
second (Tertullian) matter little if I myself, as carnal being, do not also par-
ticipate in this double movement that fashions salvation. The exteriority of
the object to belief in theology and of the experience to description would be
enough to ruin the entire enterprise if the examination of the “flesh” would
not at the same time carry out my own self-transformation—as a believer,
certainly, but also as a philosopher. The affair here is not apologetic, but
first a matter of phenomenological conversion. To think as a phenomenolo-
gist, as we said at the beginning, requires that I “see otherwise” the “thing”
as it “concerns me” (Sache), to “scrutinize the depths” (scrutare profunda)
and to “bring to light” that which has not yet been laid bare (producere in
lucem). The experience of the conversion of my own gaze through that which
I see (Bonaventure) matters at least as much as, and probably more than, all
the just directives and descriptions about that which is seen: Adam, on the
one hand (Irenaeus), Christ on the other (Tertullian). Saint Bonaventure, as
a disciple of Saint Francis, himself also earthbound (Canticle of Creatures)
and engaged in the flesh (through the experience of the stigmata), establishes
today’s experience of the senses and their conversion as the site par excellence
of man’s encounter with God through a “hand to hand” [corps à corps], of
which their interlacing goes all the way to the physical nourishment of man
by the presence of the incarnate and resurrected Word: the Eucharist. The
hypothesis of the conversion of the senses—another mode and name of the
conversion of the flesh—draws us “out of our seats in the theatre” in order
“to throw us onstage.”92 Called for by the flesh of both Adam (Irenaeus)
and Christ (Tertullian), the time has come for the believer to offer his own
flesh for the sake of its metamorphosis in God (Bonaventure). Where certain
people will only see a Dolorism—in particular in Saint Francis’s experience
of the stigmata—it will be necessary to show instead that such an expressivity
of the divine in the materiality of the human signifies—for the philosopher as
well—a specific mode of the body as “concrete emblem of a manner of being
in general”—that is, the flesh, or more specifically, my flesh (Leib).93
Chapter 6
The Conversion of the Flesh (Bonaventure)
The Carnal Experiment

The leap that we are making here, from the church fathers (Irenaeus and Ter-
tullian) to the medievals (Bonaventure), is not accidental. One could rightly
object that Bonaventure knew nothing about Irenaeus and Tertullian, nor
had any access to them at all. This is true for any medieval author. Yet, as
numerous interpreters agree, Bonaventure’s filiation from Irenaeus and the
first fathers of the church is most evident on a conceptual plane, although
not historically founded. This goes for Bonaventure’s “monadological” vision
according to which we are all bound together “in the Word” (Col. 1:16), as
well as the aesthetic vision of creation as a work and not a product, and,
finally, for the soteriological motif according to which sin is not the sole
reason for the incarnation, but includes the unique desire to transfigure the
world into the dwelling (habitacle) of God.1 But there is more in the Seraphic
Doctor. For if there is a point on which he differs from his predecessors it is
that he finds a conceptuality for the nearly forgotten doctrine of the “conver-
sion of the senses.” Thus Balthasar states: “It was Origen, who, so to speak,
‘invented’ the doctrine of the ‘five spiritual senses’ . . . in St. Bonaventure this
straitened water-course suddenly swells up again to become a mighty river.”2
Here more than elsewhere, the word of Claudel cited above applies: “Not
only does spirit speak to spirit, but flesh speaks to flesh.”3
The visibility of Adam’s flesh (Irenaeus) and the solidity of Christ’s (Ter-
tullian) will therefore not return to God void, that is, “without having
fecundated the earth” (Is. 55:10)—in other words, without having converted
and transformed the flesh of the believer himself (Bonaventure). As we said
at the end of the previous chapter, the exteriority of the object studied now
awaits its intercorporeity, where the one who sees is implicated in what he
beholds and offers himself for the sake of his own metamorphosis. There is
no better guide than Bonaventure for this act, for the Franciscan experience
is carnal through and through. From the staging of the nativity scene, to
the Canticle of Creatures and the manifestation of the stigmata—everything
speaks of the flesh and to the flesh: “The flesh is for the sake of flesh” (caro
167
168 The Flesh
propter carnem), states the Seraphic Doctor, “in view of final salvation.”4
Stressing the spiritual experience of Saint Francis, Bonaventure translates the
carnally lived experience of his founding father into a philosophical key. It
is well known that “intuitions without concepts are blind.” It is also safe
to wager that the Franciscan inspiration would not have acquired such a
posterity if it had not received its most adequate formulation from the Fran-
ciscan Doctor (Bonaventure) and the tools for thought transmitted by his
master (Alexander of Hales). “Concepts without intuitions are empty” as
well.5 The originality of Bonaventure’s thought does not come from the theo
logoumena that he developed, but also from the carnal experience that he
indirectly shared with Francis, even though he did not, of course, show on
his own body such a divine excess (the stigmata). To speak of a “conversion
of the flesh” in Bonaventure is therefore to reveal how the carnal experience
of the Poverello of Assisi can and should be transmitted, albeit in a concep-
tual mode, to anyone who claims also to express in his own body such an
experience of God. It goes without saying that it is hardly a question here
of delimiting the examination to believers alone. What mystical experience
gives to be seen says something about our phenomenological mode of being
in general. It certainly can be said that limit experiences, like the stigmata in
religion or performances in art for that matter, draw discourse toward some
spheres that it could never attain on its own and gives to the body new paths
of living as soon as thought transforms it. We will proceed as follows: First,
the life of Saint Francis’s flesh in his break with Saint Dominic; second, its
translation into a new doctrine of the symbol as well as the spiritual senses;
third, the new language which is drawn out of the experience of receiving
the stigmata. These will constitute the three moments of “carnal conver-
sion,” according to Bonaventure, and therefore lead to the fulfillment of our
Adamic filiation (Irenaeus) and to our new engendering through adoption in
Christ (Tertullian).
Language of the Flesh and Flesh of Language
I repeat what I have already mentioned in relation to Meister Eckhart above:

the difference between the affective and the intellectual in the Franciscan and
Dominican modes of being- in-
the-
world, respectively, finds its origin, for
both, in the unique mendicant order where the veritable poverty of the first
beatitude (“Blessed are the poor . . .”) is rooted in the detachment and non-
k
nowledge of poverty itself (chap. 3: Eckhart). After this community of nature
(the mendicant order), the foundational experience of the flesh in Saint Francis
becomes clarified in its difference with the original experience of the word in
Saint Dominic (chap. 6: Bonaventure). Yet the word of the flesh in Francis and
the flesh of the word in Dominic signifies more than two divergent options for
radical discipleship. These two postures between the word and flesh indicate
The Conversion of the Flesh 169
two distinct but complementary manners of envisaging the task of philoso-

phy today: descriptive phenomenology, on the side of the carnal experience
of the Friars Minor (book of the world), and hermeneutic on the side of the
linguistic translation of the Order of Preachers (world of the book). This is
a harsh distinction indeed—requiring significant nuance in order to avoid a
hardened opposition between two perspectives (and two orders!). The word is
not the exclusive right of hermeneutics or of the Dominicans, just as much as
the body is not the exclusive property of descriptive phenomenology or of the
Franciscans. The hermeneutics of the text is at the same time a hermeneutics
of the body (see Ricoeur, Oneself as Another); the blackfriar is even close to
the body (see the doctrine of transubstantiation in Aquinas); descriptive phe-
nomenology does not leave the flesh without a voice (see Merleau-Ponty, The
Prose of the World); and the carnal silence of the greyfriar is nothing if not in
search of a voice (see the canticle of Francis).
But such a methodologically necessary prudence in our approach does
not prohibit the recognition of a certain divergence or distinction. The way
of the hermeneutic of the text (in Gadamer or Ricoeur) is not that of the
phenomenology of the body (Husserl or Merleau-Ponty), and the intuition
of the flesh of language or of the world of the book (Saint Dominic) does not
come under the jurisdiction of the language of the flesh or of the book of the
world (Saint Francis). The visions differ and yet complement one another,
understood mystically as well as philosophically. The diverging paths only
reveal all the more the richness of thought—and it hardly ought to end in an
interminable quarrel (either ecclesiastical or philosophical). To take note of
it is simply, once again, to reveal in a new way that recourse to the tradition
is never merely traditional and that the reappropriation of past approaches
opens the way to a new future that constantly reinvents it.
Saint Francis, or the Language of the Flesh

As is well known, with the appearance of the mendicant orders, the “regular
clergy” come to take on the tasks once reserved for the “secular clergy” even
as they institute a new kind of relation to the world. Against Rupert of Deutz,
for whom “all the apostles were really monks” (omnes apostoli vere fuerunt
monachi), marked by “the teaching, fraternal communion and the breaking of
bread” (Acts 2:42),6 Saints Francis and Dominic broke down the walls of the
cloister and consecrated the world as the new space of the presence of God
and his glorification. To Lady Poverty, who asked the new Franciscan commu-
nity to show her its cloister, “the brothers themselves,” says the letter on the
Sacrum commercium, “led her up a hill and showed her a splendid panorama.
‘Madam,’ they said, ‘behold our cloister.’ ”7 What gives the world its density
[épaisseur] through the evangelization of the mendicants also gives to the
body its importance as the locus of the conversion of the believer. The Chris-
tian being-in-the-world, posed in a new way by the Franciscans, determines
170 The Flesh
its “being-in-the-flesh.” The “book of the world,” as locus of the proclama-

tion, does not go forth apart from a profound conversion of the “flesh of the
believer” as the expression and visibility of God. The imitatio Christi (in the
form of the evangelical rule of poverty) and the nudity of the flesh (manifested
in Bernardone’s lawsuit against his son Francis) are joined together in order to
make the creation’s praise (Canticle of Creatures) the locus of a conversion of
the carnal relation of man to the world. The life of Francis, mystically shared
and philosophically conceptualized through Saint Bonaventure’s retelling
(Legenda maior), thus serves as the head of the lance, which, when thrust,
manifests Franciscan spirituality as a true language of the flesh.
The Imitatio Christi. The imitatio Christi, instituted in the twelfth and thir-
teenth centuries by the mendicants as a Christian mode of being in the world,
is a precise answer to the Christian requirement to make God visible in the
lived experience of the flesh of the believer. Although other great figures had
espoused the ideal of evangelical poverty well before Francis and Dominic,
this new birth of the thirteenth century made the Gospel itself a way of life
(ordo vivendi): “Some new rule, I have not,” exclaimed Francis to the papal
curia, “my single rule is the Gospel.” Here the Gospel, if it has ever ceased
being such, becomes the rule (regula evangelica). Under this evangelical
imperative there lies no longer simply the common life of the Apostles as
model of the monastic life (Acts 2:42) but also the call of Jesus to the twelve:
“Procure for yourselves neither gold nor money for your belts, neither purse
for the road, nor two tunics, neither sandals, nor stick because the laborer is
worthy of his pay” (Matt. 10:9). “Behold what I desire, all that my soul longs
for!” exclaims Francis, enraptured by joy, who, out of the blue, “removes his
shoes, lets his stick fall, and, throwing away his pouch and money as objects
of horror, keeping only a single tunic, leaving behind his belt and replacing it
with a cord . . .”8 Here, the habit makes the monk, contrary to convention,
not in the sense that the tunic or the cord properly identifies him, but rather
because the “dispossession of goods” makes the saint into a “good man,”
the one to whom “an impulse communicated by God pushes him to the con-
quest of evangelical perfection and to a campaign of penitence.”9 Here the
flesh is “a concrete emblem of a general manner of being” and not a simple
“contradictory union” of bodily and spiritual substances (Merleau-Ponty).
It reveals and is revealed, both mystically and phenomenologically, as the
“visibility of a manner of being-in-the-world” and the appearance of a new
“style” by which man is properly identified.10 The others that soon follow—
brother Leo, brother Rufin, brother Bernard, brother Gilles, or brother
Sylvester—not only heard the words of the blissful father, but also followed
his example, seeing his flesh imitate the flesh of Christ and following suit in
their own bodies his manner of living in his own body. So Francis said to
them after reading the Gospel: “if you want to be perfect, go and put into
practice what you have come to hear.”11 The imitatio Christi, advocated anew
in the thirteenth century, rediscovered the meaning of the body as a sort of

practice of existence, but one that is here no longer deciphered in the figure
of Adam (Irenaeus) or the incarnate Word (Tertullian), but in the posture of
the saint transformed by strict obedience to the rule of the Gospel (Bonaven-
ture). Following upon the flesh of Christ, the visibility of the believer’s flesh
embarks on the path of the fullest dispossession, even to the point of nudity
as expressed by brother Francis when his father took him to court.
The Nudity of the Flesh. When, in 1206, Francis denuded himself before the
incredulous inhabitants of Assisi, he indicated more than a simple familial
rupture or the pure abandonment of material goods. By this act the saint
substituted the spiritual adoption of living flesh [corporalité] (Leiblichkeit)
for the genetic filiation of bodiliness [corporéité] (Körperlichkeit). Bernar-
done, notably called by Saint Bonaventure the “carnal father of a son of
grace,” sought to bring to justice the one whom he considered a biologi-
cal part of his “body.” What came to be exposed was that his son lived in
his own proper “flesh,” and that his mode of being in the world in no way
partook of the material possession of goods that his father wanted to incul-
cate in him. Bonaventure comments, “Consumed by an admirable fervor and
carried away by a spiritual intoxication, Francis stripped down and, com-
pletely naked [totus denudatur] before the audience, declared to his father,
‘To this day I have called you father on this earth; however, I can say with
assurance: “Our Father who art in heaven,” since it is to him that I have
entrusted my treasure and faith.’ ”12 Francis’s nudity does not lie completely
under the sign of renunciation. It also bares, to borrow the words of Levinas,
a body exposed to the other, the fragility of being “without defense,” and
“the absolute opening of the Transcendent.”13 In exegeting this passage, Saint
Bonaventure himself attributes a symbolic meaning to this manifestation of
the flesh, understanding it in the sense of the sequela Christi more than within
the horizon of a simple anecdotal rupture with a familial body: “They gave
him the poor homespun coat of a farmer in the service of the bishop. Francis
received it with gratitude . . . the vestment signified well the crucified and this
poor, half-naked one [seminudi]. In this way was the servant of the Great
King left naked [nudus relictus est] in order to walk behind his Lord who
was affixed naked [nudum crucifixum] to the cross.”14 There is thus a clear
analogy between Christ “affixed naked” to the wood of the cross at Golgotha
and Francis “half naked” in Assisi. Following the Crucified, the saint, against
less authentic forms of spiritualizing Christianity, reveals that the “Lord is for
the body,” and that it is fitting within Christianity to “glorify the Lord by the
body” (1 Cor. 6:13, 20). Far from any Dolorism, the nude (nudus) pertains
to Christianity in an exemplary fashion. The artists, from the first Cluniac
representations (Vézeley) to the altarpiece of Mathias Grünewald (Isenheim),
were not wrong to make the representation of the naked Christ the heart
of an “incarnate” spirituality that would only be interpreted falsely in later
172 The Flesh
centuries as an apology for suffering.15 According to the interpretation of

Bonaventure, the flesh of Francis reveals the flesh of Christ. In his carnal
“hand to hand” [corps à corps] is articulated the true espousal of man and
God, extended, according to the Franciscan perspective, to the entirety of the
relation of man to the world.
The Canticle of Creatures. After the imitatio Christi (rule of the Gospel)
and the nudity of the flesh (trial), the third and last trait of the “language
of the flesh” in Franciscan spirituality is the praise of creation (Canticle of
Creatures). The Canticle has certainly been well examined, but most authors,
lacking theological good sense, tend facilely to draw it toward a kind of
paganism. We would be wrong to see it as a simple ode to creatures, as if it
were sufficient to shine a little divine light on them to make them worthy of
praise. It therefore does not suffice to reduce, as Max Scheler did in his phe-
nomenological commentary on the Canticle, the predications of Francis to a
“continued incarnation of God the Father in nature and its continued vivifi-
cation by God” because of his “sympathy for the world.” To argue that the
saint “would have introduced into his account a good dose of pantheism” if
he had himself to exegete the song, appears at the very least to contradict the
first ambition of this praise itself.16 This song is not a Canticle of Creatures
as much as a Canticle to the Creator. And if it is a matter of understand-
ing its title (Il Cantico di Fratre Sole/Cantico delle Creature), the canticle of
creatures invites them, subjectively, to praise the Creator (subjective geni-
tive) rather than objectively praising other creatures (objective genitive). This
observation is important, for otherwise we would soon be interpreting the
poem in a pantheistic or numinous sense which does not fit it: such exegeses
are all too common and if sometimes more attractive they are also more
superficial than the straightforward reading of the text.
The succession of praises suffices to indicate the purpose of the canticle:
“Praised are you my Lord, with every creature, especially my lord brother
sun . . . for sister moon and the stars . . . for brother wind and the air and
clouds . . . for sister water, for brother fire . . . for sister our mother earth.”17
Let us retain three traits that make the Franciscan vision a mode of the “flesh
of the world.” (a) First: the exhortation invokes the Lord “with” his creatures.
Its addressee is therefore clear. The Canticle of Creatures does not praise the
creatures, but the Creator, on whom they depend. (b) Second: the appellation
of the creatures always carries with it the patronymic of “brother” (fratello)
or “sister” (sorella). Such is already the sign if not the proof that the song
does not first concern the creatures but rather the Father from whom they
come. Much like Francis becoming the “spiritual son” of the Father of heaven
by breaking with his “carnal father,” the creatures are called to recognize the
paternity of God from whom they receive their filiality, and thanks to whom
they receive a fraternity among themselves. We do not praise the sun for its
own sake, even though it is the source of light and energy that enlightens and
warms men—no more than we praise water because it fecundates the earth.
Only because the Father is the origin of the light of the sun is it necessary to
praise him for it (rather than her), and only because he is the source of the
fecundity of the earth is it fitting to recognize him as the one who quenches
our thirst (rather than her). Scheler’s “sympathies of nature” are not able
to be understood apart from Bonaventure’s “creative Trinity” by whom all
things are given to the world. Saint Bonaventure’s exegesis of the intuition
of Francis is not wrong in the interpretation it gives precisely to this depen-
dence of creatures on the Creator as to their sole principle, that is, the Father
in his fontal plenitude: “By means of climbing up to the first Origin of all
things, Francis conceived for them all an overflowing friendship, and called
even the smallest creatures brother and sister, for he knew that they, along
with himself, flow together from the same unique principle.”18 (c) Third: the
paradoxical formula of “sister our mother earth” accomplishes the conferral
of a Trinitarian design, rather than one merely numinous, on the Canticle of
Creatures. Irenaeus’s interpretation of the Adamic narrative and the Greco-
Latin tradition certainly teach us the “maternity” of the earth. The “dirt” of
the second narrative of the creation of Adam in Genesis, like the “chôra” of
the Timaeus of Plato, serves as a “matrix” for our engenderment. Thus Plato:
“The mother and receptacle (chôra) . . . [is] an invisible and characterless
sort of thing, one that receives all things and shares in a most perplexing
way in what is intelligible, a thing extremely difficult to comprehend.”19 The
Christian vision, however, is totally other, neither merely Jewish (Genesis) nor
completely Greek (Timaeus). Our “mother earth” becomes “sister,” as Saint
Francis says so well, in that this earth from which we are formed also depends
on another whose unique paternity we come to recognize. The Trinitarian fili-
ation of all creatures from the Father includes even our mother earth. Cosmic
fraternity springs up all the more for all creatures as they recognize together
their common and unique origin, which is the Father of heaven (more than
it is our mother the earth): “Seeing in nature a mother is to find only a step-
mother. Nature is not our mother but our sister: such was in this regard the
major affirmation of Christianity.”20 So says Chesterton, justly, concerning
Saint Francis.
The necessity of a personalizing and sanctifying, that is, Trinitarian
interpretation as opposed to an anonymous and sacralizing and therefore
ontologically neutral interpretation of the Canticle is therefore proposed
by the very letter of the text. Fraternity comes solely from a shared filiality,
and thus “cosmic” and “sympathetic” nature cannot be understood indepen-
dently of Trinitarian donation. It follows that an apophatic reading of the
Canticle likewise has no place. Bonaventure, along with his inspiration, Saint
Francis, is not Denys the Areopagite. The latter’s negative theology can only
be juxtaposed here with the cataphatic theology of the former. The Francis-
can does not overcome creatures in order to reach God in his nudity, but
rather recognizes, on the contrary, in creatures themselves, and their ways
174 The Flesh
of being in the world, the best means of living and seeing the ways of God’s
being itself. Such is accomplished by “transfer of language” or “metaphors.”
Thus Bonaventure in his Commentary on the Sentences: “With the praise of
God in view, it is necessary to make recourse to metaphor [translatio]. Since
in fact God is well worthy of praise, and so that praise does not cease from
lack of words, Holy Scripture has taught us to transfer the names of crea-
tures toward God.”21 The beginning of Francis’s Canticle affirms nothing else,
but invokes the impossibility of the direct nomination of God, not in order
to renounce speaking to him, but rather to make possible his decipherment
through his creatures who reflect and reveal him: “To you alone are praise,
honor and glory worthy, O Most High, and no man is worthy to speak your
name . . . Be praised my Lord with all your creatures.”22
By analogy with the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, here the flesh com-
pletely overflows the sole corporeal being of man to which philosophy had up
to this point been restrained. In Bonaventure’s sense, it is not contradictory to
speak of the “flesh of the world” for which the “book of the world” precedes
the “book of Scripture.”23 In Franciscan praise, the believer enjoys such a
familiarity with the world that the latter seems to speak to him, even to see
him. The legend of the “wolf of Gubbio,” when Francis “addresses him” and
the wolf “acquiesces by the movements of his body,” or for that matter his
counsels to “his brother birds” that they silence their loud songs during the
recitation of the Psalms—all these are not mere fabulous accounts of Francis-
can mysticism. They speak to us of something that our contemporaries have
mostly lost, namely, a sort of friendship with “this sensible universe of bodily
things” understood as a “house built for man” (domus homini fabricata), to
use Bonaventure’s language, or the “arch-originary-earth” which does not
move, to use Husserl’s.24 Merleau-Ponty emphasizes in a similar way that
“science renounces dwelling in things inasmuch as it manipulates them.” In
light of the Franciscan experience, yet without simply repeating it, the pres-
ent task is therefore to discover a mode of inhabiting the world, in which
the latter no longer appears as a stranger, and a cosmic fraternity, in which
the relations among creatures articulates their common dependence on the
Creator. Much like the painter who “takes his body into the world in order
that the world would change into painting,” the creature, in the Franciscan
vision of the world, expresses his Creator. Such is the extraordinary inversion
of the act of seeing and of the visible, already lived mystically by Saint Fran-
cis in the Canticle, and rediscovered by phenomenology in Merleau-Ponty’s
meditation on the experience of the painter in L’œil et l’esprit: “Between the
painter and the visible,” he says, citing Paul Klee and André Marchand, “the
roles are inevitably reversed. This is why painters have said that the things
see them . . . : in a forest I have felt numerous times that it was not me who
was looking at the forest. Some days I have felt that it was the trees who
were looking at me, speaking to me . . . I was there, listening . . . I believe
that the painter ought to be transpierced by the universe instead of simply
endeavoring to transpierce it . . . I expect to be interiorly submerged, buried.

Perhaps I paint in order to rise back up.”25
Saint Dominic, or The Flesh of Language

From the descriptive reading of the Franciscan experience of the body
enlarged to the dimensions of the world it is necessary to distinguish the
Dominican experience of language proper to the Order of Preachers. Here
phenomenology becomes hermeneutics, where interpretation means “making
a proposition about the world such that I can inhabit it in order to project
within it one of my most proper possibilities” (Ricoeur).26 The mute expe-
rience of the body now enacts its distanciation through spoken discourse
where textual significations take the place of corporeal kinestheses. Jean-
R
ené Bouchet emphasizes this in his exegesis of the Dominican experience:
“Preaching is not a work for St. Dominic. It is a matter of creating a man-
ner of being in the Church: being before God, being together, being in the
world . . . Through the encounter of preaching on the basis of the key theme
of the vita apostolica, the elements of canonical and monastic life take on
a new tonality. They are harmonized in a new kind of life, a new manner
of being that they seek to structure and support.”27 The preacher of grace
(praedicator gratiae) and the grace of preaching is in fact the new mode of
Christian being in the world instituted by the founder of the preachers.28
By analogy to the itinerancy of the body, two by two on the roads, as in
the Franciscan mode of life, the grace of the word, first the exclusive privilege
of the secular clergy, is suddenly introduced into the rule of the Dominicans:
“Let it be known to all, now and in the future, that I, Bishop Foulques, by the
grace of God humble minister of the See of Toulouse, do institute as preach-
ers [praedicatores] in my diocese brother Dominic and his companions . . .
Their regular program is to live like a monk, to go on foot and in evangelical
poverty to preach the evangelical word.”29 To confer “order” onto speech—
setting aside the pun—is immediately to dictate the order of finding one’s
body and even inhabiting a flesh. In other words, in a similar way as the
flesh was instituted in language in Saint Francis, language or speech finds a
flesh to assume a body in Saint Dominic. The three moments of this “flesh of
language” or hermeneutics, implemented in the Dominican way are the shar-
ing of the word, its use as a weapon to convert the heretic, and the work of
language [langue; or tongue] conceived as an organ.
Sharing the Word. The gift of all his goods to the poor was the first ges-
ture of Dominic that cast him into the mode of being of the beggar, which
thus allowed him to discover the density of the world. Like Francis, who
exchanged his belt for a cord, discarded his shoes, stick, pouch, and money
and even dispossessed himself of his tunic in the trial at Assisi, Dominic “sold
the books that he possessed, however truly indispensable, and all his personal
176 The Flesh
effects. Making alms of everything, he will disperse his goods, giving them to
the poor.”30 For the visibility of the imitatio Christi in a denuded flesh in Saint
Francis, corresponds the sharing of a book as a “truly indispensable” gift in
Saint Dominic, following the example of the widow “giving from out of her
poverty” (Mk. 12:44). When the book was given, or abandoned, the word is
shared and already inscribed on flesh. In order not to stay a dead letter, the
text is first offered to the most poor, to the suffering and to beggars, to those
whose disincarnate flesh says nothing other than the expectation of a word
which will again “incarnate” them into existence.
The sequela Christi here becomes “preaching”: we are no longer in the
realm of the monastic life, allegedly rooted in the apostolic life (monastic
orders), nor the marriage of the fool to Lady Poverty in order to accompany
those for whom nothing remains but tears with which to cry (Franciscan
order), but rather the office of preaching (officium praedicationis) in order
to bring speech to the one who has lost it. Thus Paul’s exhortation to Timo-
thy becomes a leitmotif for Saint Dominic: “Proclaim the word, be ready in
season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, always with passion and
the desire to instruct” (2 Tim. 4:2). Poor here does not merely designate the
one for whom material misery conceals spiritual ambitions. Impoverished of
sane doctrine, the heretic on the contrary, has unfortunately raised up false
speech, a word warped by the absence of flesh to welcome it, the insupport-
able bursting open of the one who perverts the meaning of the Word from
within. Such will be the ultimate signification of the preaching of the Saint
Dominic against the so-called pure Cathari.
The Weapon of Speech. The one is called pure (katharos) or perfect whose
word is not incarnated in a flesh any longer: “The flesh is the work of Satan:
he imprisons within it the spiritual element perpetuated by carnal genera-
tion born from concupiscence and which is fundamentally impure.”31 Speech
remains without a flesh because desire no longer exists in the flesh of the one
who utters it (sexual abstinence, condemnation of eating animal flesh, etc.).
Against this perversion of the Gospel, only the word of preaching founded
on sane doctrine furnishes the antidote. Hence the affair of Saint Dominic
and the Catharist innkeeper in Toulouse (1203): “During the very night that
they lodged in the city, the sub-prior (Dominic) attacked with force and pas-
sion the heretical host of the house, multiplying discussions and arguments
meant to persuade him. The heretic could not resist the wisdom and the Spirit
who was speaking: through the intervention of the divine Spirit, Dominic
reduced him to faith.”32 Suddenly, in the play of words is found the goad of
conversion. For the blows of the lance of the chevalier on crusade is replaced
the argumentative assaults of the preacher. One menaces and kills, the other
converts. One reaches the body (Körper), the other penetrates the flesh (Leib),
ripping open like a wound a proper mode of being at the heart of the being
of the world.
No more than genetic filiation suffices to translate the being in the world of
Francis at the trial of Assisi, no more than the material weapon fits to express
the profundity of the spiritual breakthrough: when the soldier gives up his
vainglory, relinquishing bloodshed, the speech of the preacher is inscribed
on the flesh and transforms it. It is thus a “more refined work to defend the
faithful by spiritual arms [spiritualibus armis] against the errors propagated
by the heretics,” says Thomas Aquinas, “than by means of material arms”
(quam corporalibus armis).33 That which cultivates the flesh and determines
a concrete emblem of a manner of being in the world as the proper sphere
of belonging, is thus discovered implicitly in this incompressible residue of
the act of speech. Like the deployment of the “world of the text which,”
according to Paul Ricoeur, “forms and transforms the reader’s being-a-self
in accordance with his or her intention,”34 language takes on flesh in this
predicational hand-to-hand combat [corps à corps] of the preacher and the
heretic: a battle of language of which the single end is to defeat, through the
formation and information of speech, the future believer in his last stages of
resistance.
The Work of the Tongue (Langue). Since speech, in the preachers, chooses a
body to be inscribed in an order for which the essential first consists in action
and the promise associated with preaching, the question becomes: which
works—or better, what works—(are) within this body? Neither the hands, as
in the Benedictine modality, nor even the feet, as in Franciscan itinerancy, but
rather the tongue [langue] in the proper sense of the term (lingua): “It still
needs to be known that by manual work,” states Thomas Aquinas, “we ought
to understand every human industry that honestly assures our subsistence,
whether they utilize the hands [sive manibus operari], the feet [sive pedibus],
or the tongue [sive lingua].”35 However surprising, the tongue [langue] for
Saint Thomas (on this point a hermeneut of Saint Dominic and the Order of
Preachers) is paradigmatically the “organ” by which a word [parole] is given
and transmitted. Words [les mots] of language find in this organ their flesh,
not simply in the sense of a pure emission of phonemes (bodiliness [corporé-
ité]) but in the sense that, by its very articulation is transmitted an original
meaning from the speaking to the hearing subject (living flesh [corporalité]).
Here the focus is no longer on the single act of language put in operation
by the speaker, nor on the content of the message, but rather on the hearer
himself established, for himself and in himself, as the formal object of the dis-
course perceptible to the ear. Aquinas adds: “The second object of teaching
is found on the side of the discourse perceptible to the ear. And this object is
the hearer himself” (ipse audiens).36 The originality of this unique formula,
even for the history of subsequent philosophy, ought to be clear. For the first
time perhaps in the history of thought, a theory of the acts of language is
conceptualized for which the act of “speaking” (or better, of “preaching”)
brings explicitly into view the “hearer himself,” and specifically conceived as
178 The Flesh
the perception of the discourse through the organ of his ear, rather than the
simple content of the teaching. We are very far indeed from the mere birth of
pedagogy or even a repetition of ancient sophism (as if he were really talking
about the necessity always to adapt the discourse to the addressee). What is
discovered here in Thomas’s consideration of the hearer as the formal object
or category of discourse is the locus of a veritable reflection on intersubjectiv-
ity (as we will see below in chap. 8), namely, the consideration of a truth “to
transmit” rather than merely “to contemplate” and “to communicate” rather
than “to keep within oneself.” Thus he famously emphasizes that “it is more
fitting to illuminate than it is simply to shine [maius est illuminare quam
lucere solum], in the same way that it is more fitting to transmit to others
what one contemplates [sicut enim ita maius est contemplata aliis tradere]
than it is simply to contemplate in itself [quam solum contemplari].”37
The discourse of the preacher, being thus addressed to the heretic with
his conversion in view, therefore makes of the other (the heretic) the recipi-
ent of a discourse for which the category of the dumbfounded interlocutor
[interlocuteur interloqué] dominates over the very object of the interlocution
itself. To see this from the light of another context (and to avoid confusion),
namely, Ricoeur’s critique of Rudolf Bultmann’s view that the evangelical
kerygma is simply the occasion for an existential decision of the believer:
in the same way the act of speech in Dominic is not merely the pretext for
the transformation of the heretic. On the contrary—and to return to the
Dominican mode of being as “preacher”—as soon as the organ of language
articulates some words (corps) in order thus to give to them a meaning [sens]
(chair) for which the hearer himself is the object (ipse audiens), the word
[parole] itself and it alone produces its work in the interlocutor and converts
the heretic. We can distinguish here two thresholds of comprehension, in
contemporary hermeneutics (Ricoeur) as much as in Dominican preaching
(Aquinas): “There is meaning (what the text says) and there is signification
(what the text says to me) which is the moment of repetition of the meaning
by the reader.” In the same way that “the moment of exegesis is not that of an
existential decision, but that of ‘meaning,’ ”38 the moment of preaching is not
that of the consideration of a statement [énoncé] but rather the manifestation
of a situation of the act of stating [énonciation] (relation of two interlocu-
tors for which the transformation by the discourse takes precedence over the
very object of the discourse).39 Language finds its flesh in this conversion of
the heart. This is a flesh for which the proper manner of being in the world
consists in uttering a word [parole] through which the logos produces its
“transforming effect” by means of the very One who is Logos and Word.
When language takes on flesh, the flesh becomes language. Such is a strange
return which always makes of the dumbfounded believer the receiver [inter-
loqué] of this Interlocutor who as it were expresses nothing but himself, at
once the flesh of language and the language of flesh: “In the beginning was
the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the
beginning with God . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us”
(Jn. 1:1, 14).
As language of the flesh or flesh of language, the world is thus a “book”
to be deciphered (as we will shortly see) for both Franciscan and Dominican
modes of spirituality, both of which inherited a Victorine thematic of the
liber scriptus intus et foris: “There are two books,” says Bonaventure, with
reference to the Apocalypse (5:1) and citing Hugh of Saint Victor, “or better,
there are two readings of the same book [duplex est liber], one writes interi-
orly [intus], which is the art and eternal wisdom of God, and the other writes
exteriorly [foris], which is the sensible world.” But in both cases, whether as
the eternal wisdom delivered by the Scriptures (liber scripturae) or the sen-
sible world unveiled by creatures (liber mundi), it is one and the same book
that is read—neither only text (hermeneutics) nor merely flesh (phenomenol-
ogy); rather the “Word made flesh” writes within by his speech (Word) and
without by his incarnation (flesh): “Because the eternal wisdom and his work
is found reunited in the one person Christ, he is called the written book with-
out and within [liber scriptus et foris] for the salvation of the world.”40
Responding to the vacuity of a word without flesh (hermeneutics without
phenomenology) as to the blindness of a flesh without word (phenomenology
without hermeneutics), the sudden appearance of the Word made flesh unites
together and originally the two main lines of contemporary philosophy. Flesh
of language and language of flesh (book of the world and world of the book),
the two modes of being in the world, are thus held in an ultimate recapitula-
tion about which theology teaches that the Word is never seen without a body,
nor is the body expressed without speech. The incarnation of the Son is there-
fore not only an experience of the past, according to Bonaventure, even if the
Ascension and the closure of the canon would mark the rupture. The doctrine
of the spiritual senses and the philosophical interpretation of the stigmata
of Saint Francis lead us to think otherwise—and phenomenologically—the
carnal relation of man to God. “The Franciscan mystery is the center that
crystallizes all” (Balthasar),41 the spiritual experience of brother Francis leads
back to the heart of Christianity in the mystery of the incarnation—an incar-
nation, not of the Word alone, but also of man “tout court,” sanctified in his
encounter [corps à corps] with the Word made flesh.
From Symbol to the Spiritual Senses
It is too little known that after Origen but before Ignatius of Loyola, Bonaven-
ture, the exegete of Saint Francis, developed the doctrine of the “spiritual
senses.” Here we are not under the regime of concepts. The spiritual senses
indicate the entirety of the human person that is summoned forth in order
to manifest God. Rather than simply “understanding,” they first have to do
with “seeing”—in the precise sense of seeing “how” (quomodo) God is given
180 The Flesh
and reflected through his love in human flesh. Saints and men of God in
general reflect by their countenance the “mystery of charity.” Saint Francis
of Assisi himself bore the carnal marks in his body (holes in his feet and
hands and a pierced heart). Here, by way of the carnal experience of the
divine, is established a new relation to God, to the body and to the world in
general—a relation to which the Christian seems to be called by the voice of
the incarnate and resurrected Word. This Merleau-Ponty said in such a pen-
etratingly astute way: “Christianity is, among other things, the recognition
of a mystery . . . which rightly holds that the Christian God does not want a
vertical relation of subordination . . . Christ attests that God would not fully
be God without wedding himself to the human condition . . . Transcendence
no longer hangs ominously over man: he becomes strangely the privileged
bearer of it.”42 Something similar goes for the Franciscan mystery, for which
the “symbolic vision of the world” and the doctrine of the “spiritual senses”
(Bonaventure) provide a philosophical framework and serve as the theologi-
cal content for the sake of a proper understanding of the “experience of the
stigmata” of Saint Francis.
The Density of the Symbol

The Symbolic, or the Good Use of the Sensible. Inherited from Denys the
Areopagite, the Bonaventurian definition of symbolic theology remains to
this day forgotten, to say the least: “By the symbolic mode of theology [per
modum symbolicam theologiae] we learn the good use of sensible things
[recte utamur sensibilibus].”43 Here distinguished from “speculative” theol-
ogy (the good use of the intelligible) and from “mystical” theology (raptures
and transports of the spirit), the “symbol” in Bonaventure (Greek: sumbo-
lon) does not simply designate a “sign of recognition” or the “relation of
a signifier to other signifiers” (E. Ortigues).44 On the contrary, it marks a
certain manner of relating to the sensible world “in a mirror” (in speculum),
“through creatures” (per creaturas), and “in creatures” (in creaturis), so that
they are “vestiges” (vestigia) by which God is seen dwelling and remaining
with them: “Starting from the grandeur and beauty of creatures, the Creator
can become known,” says the Book of Wisdom (13:5), heavily commented
on by Bonaventure.45 The “vestige” here, in the Franciscan doctor in particu-
lar, is not merely a “trace” of an absent God toward whom one must climb
(Augustinian perspective), but rather the “icon” of a God who is present and
on whom it is necessary to alight (Bonaventurian perspective). The density of
the sensible for Bonaventure is of such a kind that it expresses something of
God himself, and the modes of being of the world are also the modes of being
of God himself inasmuch as he espouses even our sensations in his incar-
nation: “To be a vestige,” says Trophime Mouiren on Bonaventure, “is not
an accidental feature of any creature, something added by the piety of our
regard; it is the very being of the thing, its manner of being, of being tied and
dependent and reflecting.”46 Despite the loss of the Dionysian manuscript,

Bonaventure appears here as the true inheritor of the Symbolic Theology of
the Areopagite—though let us recall that the conservation of this text alone
would have probably changed our conception of the figure of Denys as much
as, perhaps, the entire history of Western thought. And let us see this text less
as the inheritor of Neoplatonism and more the operator of its transformation
at the heart of Christianity. Thus the Areopagite indicates at the heart of his
Mystical Theology that “in my Symbolic Theology, I have discussed analo-
gies of God drawn from what we perceive. I have spoken of images we have
of him, of the forms, figures, and instruments proper to him, of the places in
which he lives and the ornaments he wears. I have spoken of his anger, grief,
and rage, of how he is said to be drunk and hung over, of his oaths and curses,
of his sleeping and waking, and indeed of all those images we have of him,
images shaped by the workings of the symbolic representations of God.”47
The interpretation of Denys often loses its way in the clouds of divine
ineffability, to the point of leaving, as much as possible, human sensibility.
Things are completely otherwise under the impetus of the “symbolic,” which
designates neither the flight into “speculation” nor the élan of the “mysti-
cal,” but rather the act by which the “holiness” of God takes shape, namely,
by forms (parts, organs), location (and adornments), affects (anger, sadness,
enthusiasm, intoxication), even kinestheses (sleep, vigilance). As the inheritor
of Denys’s symbolic theology, Bonaventure’s conception of the relation of the
sensible and intelligible is not a simple “correspondence” or “recognition,” as
if it were a matter of the relation between some tesserae artificially disjoined
and reunited with each other, but rather involves the covenant or carnal
espousal as “metonymies of the sensible to the divine” which see in the small-
est part of the lived experience of man something of the total presence of God
himself. The “symbol” (sum-bolon) certainly reunites, contrary to the diabol-
ical (dia-bolon), as we will shortly see. The act of union is not content with a
simple formal “analogy” of worlds. The “conformity of worlds” (microcos-
mos/macrocosmos) occurs in such a way that one does not have to overcome
the sensible in order to pass to the intelligible. Rather, one discovers “in”
(in) and “through” (per) the sensible itself whereof to read and decipher the
presence of the intelligible: “At each degree, one can discover God through
his mirror [per speculum] or in his mirror [in speculo].”48 Creatures here are
not conceived as beings in an ontic gap inadequate to Bonaventurian symbol-
ism, but rather as “modes of being” of God starting from the “condition of
creatures” (conditionem creaturum), considered as a “testimony” (testimo-
nium) of his grandeur in his abasement.49 The sensible therefore “signifies”
God himself, revealing his presence (icon) rather than returning to him in the
mode of absence (trace). The “vestige” (vestigium) no longer witnesses simply
to the “past” and “passage” of God in creation in a totally Platonic way, but
in itself retains for those who know how to see him there, the One who today
still passes through and remains. The always secondary attempt in Augustine
182 The Flesh
of “detecting, if we are able [si possumus], in the exterior man some vestige of
the Trinity [qualecumque vestigium Trinitatis],” becomes in Bonaventure the
first ambition: “Being a vestige [esse vestigium] is not an accidental feature
of any creature [nulli accidit creaturae]” (II Sent. 16).50 If Augustine sees the
necessary modification of Platonism in the framework of the Christian vision
of creation (though without accomplishing it)—“I have read the books of the
Platonists . . . but that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, I did
not read there”51—then Bonaventure accomplishes it by annulling the sepa-
ration of worlds by making the sensible the very symbolic support of the full
Trinitarian manifestation of God. Hans Urs von Balthasar noted this break,
which discloses the carnal originality of Bonaventure’s thought: “The Trinity
is not (as for Denys) the absolutely separated and unknowable, nor (as for
Augustine) is everything in the world that speaks of the divine Persons mere
appropriation. Rather, the Trinity is truly revealed in its overflow into the
world (in creation and the Incarnation of Christ), and shows itself thereby to
be the a priori ground of everything that exists in the world.”52
With this rediscovery of the “symbolic” as “good use” (recte utamur) of
the sensible in Bonaventure, contemporary sacramental theology would have
much to gain from a reinterrogation of the patristic and medieval corpus—a
way, to say the least, of giving flesh to the symbol. Recent sacramental theol-
ogy has an all too worn-out concept of the “recognition” of the sign and thing
through the metaphor of tesserae (as signs of recognition between two parties
or tribes) that no longer offers an illuminative conceptualization. Despite the
necessary structure of the return of the “sign” (signum) to “thing” (res) in the
sacrament, the symbolic theology still remains locked in an escape from the
sensible, as opposed to a real consideration of the body which it is prohibited
to surpass. Witness Maurice Blanchot, who offers a definition of the symbol
that still awaits a theological appropriation: “The symbol signifies nothing,
expresses nothing. It simply renders present—in rendering us present to it.
It is a reality that escapes any derequisition and seems to rise up, there, pro-
digiously close and prodigiously far, like a foreign presence . . . The symbol,
so it is a wall; then it is a wall, which, far from being opened, becomes not
only more opaque, but of a depth and density, of a reality so powerful and
exorbitant that it modifies us ourselves . . . Every symbol is an experience,
a radical changing that is necessary to be lived, a leap that is necessary to
be accomplished. There is therefore no such thing as a symbol, but rather a
symbolic experience.”53
Reading the Book. But to affirm and to acknowledge [reconnaître] the iconic
presence of God in creatures does not suffice to know [reconnaître] him
there. It is in fact for those who know how to see him there, as we mentioned
above in a formula that must be taken at face value, that the Trinity comes
to light through (per) and in (in) the “vestiges” set up as so many “mirrors”
(speculum). Those who know how to see are not content with sensible things
themselves, however admirable they truly are in their beauty and radiance.
The believer will first strive to convert the senses in order to make of his
“gaze” the place of transformation by the intentional aim of God, and not
the simple organ of a seeing so overwhelming that it bypasses any junction
with the visible. The intentional aim of the subject who sees matters as much
as the eye by which things are seen—all the more so in the Seraphic Doctor.
The modality of the gaze (aspectus) prevails over the organ of vision (ocu-
lus) as well as that which is seen (res): “In accord with this triple approach,”
insists Bonaventure, “our soul exercises three principal gazes [aspectus]: the
first onto exterior bodies . . . , the second in itself and on itself . . . , the third
on the transcendent.” With this Bonaventurian triad (sensualitas, spiritus,
mens), Henry Duméry comments, “we are not dealing with faculties in the
substantialist sense, but rather with access, gazes, functions.”54 Here the sym-
bolic depends on the interpreting subject, and not simply on the interpreted
object—with this reservation: the density of the sensible is due to the depth of
the “vestige,” and it is not sufficient to see God mentally in the thing in order
to recognize him there.
In order to admire truly the beauty of creatures it is fitting to decipher
the beauty of God himself in them. The break between Erigenian theophany
(chap. 2) and Bonaventurian conversion of the senses (chap. 6) comes about
through the hermeneutics implemented by Bonaventure that is totally absent
in Erigena. If Erigena looks at the world starting from the light that glows in
its interior—at the risk of sinking out of a truly Trinitarian deployment into a
faulty pantheism, then Bonaventure articulates [decline] an authentic discourse
on method for the sole purpose of deciphering the book of creation—and the
Trinity itself as the key to its decryption. As already established, in the Fran-
ciscan and Dominican spiritualities, the world is a book to be decoded: the
language of the flesh on the Franciscan side (descriptive phenomenology), and
the flesh of language on the Dominican side (hermeneutics). Yet a literacy
is necessary so that the conversion of the senses is also, in the first place a
transformation of the self: “The totality of this sensible world like a book
[quasi quidam liber] written by the hand of God.” So says Hugh of Saint Vic-
tor, repeated by Bonaventure. He continues, “If an illiterate [illetaratus] sees
an open book, he sees the figures [figures aspicit] but does not recognize the
letters [litteras non cognoscit] . . . Whereas the sot [insipiens] only admires
the appearance, the sage [sapiens] is well down the path of the unfathomable
thought of the divine wisdom. It is as if both had a single and same writing
before their eyes [una eademque Scriptura] and one admired the color and
formation of the figures [colorem seu formationem figuram] while the other
appreciated the meaning and signification [sensum et significationem].”55
From within the “heart of medieval life” (supra) something similar pertains to
the admiration of God in the works of creation as for the difference between
the lay brother and the educated brother. Whereas the first sees the works as
letters on parchment but cannot manage to decipher the presence of God, the
184 The Flesh
second traverses the materiality of the letter in order to discover the spirit and
find its signification. God wrote this world with “his own finger” (digito Dei),
but he demands that we learn the codes in order to discover him there, just
as one passes through the act of reading the letter in order to find the mean-
ing. Precisely because we have lost the sense while reading the “book of the
world” (liber mundi) by virtue of sin, we were given the “book of Scripture”
(liber Scripturae) as a kind of textual intermediary by which we discover life
anew. Therefore, hermeneutics, for Bonaventure the successor of Hugh, is only
an act of reading the text (Ricoeur) in a secondary sense. First it is a modality
of factical life of the believer or of man tout court (Heidegger) in the sense
that the lived experience of being in the world precedes the reading animal
and founds it through and through. In Bonaventure as much as in Heidegger,
the world is first read in order to find one’s life there (and God’s), and it is
only then that one receives the scriptures in order to learn anew how to deci-
pher it. Thus Bonaventure says in a famous passage from the Hexaemeron:
“When man fell and had lost knowledge there was no one to take him back to
God . . . This book [iste liber], that is, the world [scilicet mundus], was dead
and erased. This is why another book [alius liber] was necessary by which
man was illumined in order to interpret the metaphors of things [metaphoras
rerum]. This book is the Scripture [autem liber est Scripturae].”56
Exterior Sense and Interior Sense. Without returning to the Bonaventurian

use of metaphor, largely developed elsewhere,57 we can note here that the
conversion of the senses, like the reading of the text, merits an apprenticeship,
or better, a kind of metanoia. What we read matters less than our “manner
of living.” The “art of reading” or the Didascalion does not, in this sense,
properly belong to the Victorine school (Hugh), but rather passes into and is
transformed by the Franciscan school (Bonaventure) which makes of the “art
of reading” (ordo legendi) an “art of living” (ordo vivendi), and now expects
even the possible conversion of the senses themselves. I maintained above that
Christ, as a “book written within and without” (liber scriptus intus et foris),
holds together descriptive phenomenology (flesh) and hermeneutics (word);
now he is addressed in the “interior sense” in the contemplation of the divinity
of the incarnate Word (sensus interior) as in the “exterior sense” in the consid-
eration of his humanity (sensus exterior): “God was in fact made man in order
to render the whole man blessed in him [totum hominem], so that, whether
he goes in or comes out he finds pasture in his Creator: an external pasture
in the flesh of the Savior [pascua foris in carne salvatoris], an internal pasture
in the divinity of the Creator [et pascua intus in divinitate creatoris].”58 The
assumption of the responsibility of “humanity in its totality” certainly belongs
to the theology of Irenaeus (chap. 4) and its assumption by Christ in his flesh
to Tertullian (chap. 5), but the divine-human encounter [corps à corps] in the
apprehension of the “sensible” of God marks the uniqueness of Bonaventure’s
approach (chap. 6). What was given in Adam (Irenaeus) and partaken of by
Christ (Tertullian) is now offered to the believer in order that he also share in
the experience (Bonaventure) of a divine-human body of which the doctrine
of the spiritual senses marks the most exemplary formulation.
The Spiritual Senses

A famous passage from Bonaventure’s Breviloquium defines the “spiritual
senses” (sensus spirituales) as “mental perceptions of contemplated truth”
(perceptiones mentales circa veritatem contemplandam).59 The only justifi-
cation Bonaventure gives for this definition is its effectiveness starting from
the experience of the prophets and other righteous people (Moses and the
burning bush, Elijah and the chariot of fire, Jacob’s ladder, etc.).60 It is as if
the aforementioned “doctrine of the spiritual senses,” because it is disclosed
through figures which bear its trace, paradoxically unfolds its true meaning
beyond all “doctrine.” Just as each sense in its own way sees, feels, under-
stands, smells, and tastes—as we will see below—so also does the definition
of the spiritual senses show that even that which lives physically is capable of
being spiritually converted. The spiritual senses are “perceptions” and always
remain such, yet in such a way that they are transformed in their own way
of approaching the world, and rendered “mental” or converted into spirit,
hence perceptiones mentales. The same goes for a number of “other righteous
people,” for example, brother Francis who “heard,” in the call of the Crucifix
of Saint Damien (1206), “with the ears of flesh [ad eum corporeis audivit
auribus], a voice from the crucifix telling him three times: ‘Francis go and
repair my house which has fallen into ruin.’ ”61 It goes without saying that
this does not mean that Francis heard a voice, but rather that what is lived
spiritually is received carnally at the same time, or “like” the mode of ordi-
nary hearing but converted in God. The realism of the incarnation imposes
the thought of an encounter [corps à corps] of man and God even today.
Let us not be mistaken, however. Whether one is a prophet or among the
righteous, or even a founding brother of a new monastic order, even if by
contemplation one is elevated by “degrees” (gradibus), as on “the ladder of
Jacob the summit of which touches heaven or on the throne of Solomon,”62
his feet never leave the firm earth. The erected scaffolding, otherwise, would
risk becoming yet another tower of Babel: “The mental perception of con-
templated truth,” says Balthasar, “possesses nothing of the intellectual. It
remains from beginning to end perception, even in its supreme elevation.”63
Does this mean that it is a matter here of a bodily perception of God? We
can affirm this to the degree that God is given to perception in a body, even
multiple bodies (word, Eucharist, brother . . .). Yet we must oppose it to the
degree that these senses that perceive God are not, properly speaking, the
bodily senses but the spiritual senses “after the manner” of the bodily senses.
To understand their relation to one another we must approach them starting
from the experience of the “bodily senses” themselves.
186 The Flesh
Analogy and Conformity. In his numerous “reductions” or “renewals”

[reconductions] (reductions) of knowledge to God or to theology (De reduc-
tione artium ad theologiam), Bonaventure begins by extending [reconduire]
“the illumination of sensible knowledge” (illuminatio cognitionis sensitivae)
to the “senses of the heart” (sensum cordis): “Each sense avidly seeks the
sensible domain proper to it; it finds it with joy and returns there without
flagging . . . In the same way [per hunc etiam modum] the senses of our heart
ought to be put in quest of that which is beautiful, harmonious, of good odor,
sweet to the taste or soft to touch, discovering it with joy and searching for
it without ceasing. Behold the way [ecce quomodo] that sensible knowledge
contains the divine wisdom in a hidden form; see also the marvelous contem-
plation of the five spiritual senses [quinque sensuum spiritualium] in their
conformity to the five bodily senses [secundum conformitatem ad sensus cor-
porales].”64 There is not only analogy between the bodily and spiritual senses
(analogia as identity of relations), but also conformity (conformitas).
(a) First “analogy”: in “the same way” (per hunc etiam modum) that the
bodily senses are put in quest of their proper object (for example, vision
desiring that which is pleasing to the eye), the sense of the heart desires what
is fitting to its nature (for example, prudence or temperance): hearing and
spiritual vision accord with the uncreated Word, smell to the inspired Word,
taste and touch to the incarnate Word: “By faith does the soul believe in
Christ as the uncreated Word, the Word and splendor of the Father, it recov-
ers then spiritual hearing and sight [spiritualem auditum et visum]; hearing
receives the teachings of Christ, sight contemplates the splendors of his
light. By faith does it catch the scent of the coming of the inspired Word:
desire and fervor give off the spiritual odor [spiritualem olfactum]. Finally,
by love it embraces the incarnate Word, from whom it draws delights and
which cause it to pass into him in an ecstasy of love: it finds spiritual touch
and taste [spiritualem gustum et tactum].”65 The ordo vivendi of the bodily
senses serves as the normative regulative principle of the ordo vivendi of
the spiritual senses. Said otherwise, by learning to direct our gaze onto the
light which illumines the world or onto the uncreated Word who illumines
our heart, our sight (visum), whether carnal or spiritual, will be refined in
order to see God in all things. In practicing the taste of the perfume of honey
(gustum) and touching the softness of things (tactum), that is, in a very Fran-
ciscan attitude, our taste and touch, both carnal and spiritual, will, as it were,
come to their senses regarding the Word incarnate. “In the same way as each
sense exercises its activity on its proper object, avoiding what is harmful to
it, not annexing what is foreign to it, so also [per hunc modum] does the
sense of the heart lead a well-regulated life when it acts in relation to its
own object, combating negligence, etc.”66 The analogy between the bodily
and spiritual senses is here brought to completion, so that “if we consider
the activity of the senses, we will see a rule of life” (intuebimur ibi ordinem
vivendi).67
(b) There is a “conformity” (conformitas) of the “bodily senses” to the

“spiritual senses,” which goes beyond an identity of relations (analogia)
between them (per hunc etiam modum), and reaches a structure of resem-
blance, even of “interweaving,” which largely overcomes the borders fixed by
analogy. Since Aristotle it was common to think a relation of correspondence
or “relational ratio” [rapport de rapport] (ana-logia) of the external senses to
the internal senses.68 However, in Bonaventure’s terms, rooted in the perspec-
tive of a new ontology of creation of Christianity, the simple “correspondence
of lived experiences” becomes “the conformity of worlds” inasmuch as the
sensible world is structurally related to the soul or intellectual world, through
a relation brought about by the transforming power of God himself to cre-
ate the passage from the external senses to the internal: “The sensible world
or macrocosm [macrocosmus] penetrates [intrat] into the soul or microcosm
[microcosmus] by the gate of the five senses,” which, as we will shortly see,
is otherwise named the cross. We are thus rendered fit “to see God [con-
templandum Deum] in any creature that enters into our spirit [ad mentem
nostram intrant] by the bodily senses [per corporales sensus].”69
A Divine Sensorium. The identity of the form or structure (con-formitas)

between the bodily and spiritual senses is absolute. Just as for the bodily
senses certain objects or qualities correspond to their proper activity (color
for sight, sound for hearing, flavor for taste, etc.), so also for the spiritual
senses a certain manner of approach to the same object will be attributed to
each. A true “divine sensorium” (Balthasar) is put in place,70 not only to read
the presence of the Trinity at the heart of things (Canticle of Creatures), but
also to experience carnally the Word in the deepest depths of our sensations
(doctrine of the spiritual senses). That which serves as the guiding question
of this work, which was “from the beginning” (ab initio), according to Saint
John—“that which we have heard [audivimus], which we have seen with our
eyes [vidimus oculis nostris], which we have contemplated [perspeximus], and
which our hands have touched [manus nostrae contrectaverunt] concerning
the Word of life” (Jn. 1:1)—will not remain a dead letter in Bonaventure, nor
will it be reserved to the exclusive apostolic succession. A sensible apprehen-
sion of God is also offered to the believer today, albeit in a distinct manner
altogether rooted in a true conversion of the senses. Of course, a corporeal
and tangible experience of the incarnate Word after the manner of the first
disciples is absurd. But the absence in material body does not prohibit the
presence of a phenomenal flesh, as we will see below. We can even say that
precisely because the materiality of his body does not appear as such that his
spiritual flesh is given today to be seen and apprehended. The resurrection is
the condition for a new apprehension of the incarnation, so that what was
“from the beginning” (ab initio) is given today in a continued fashion, if
we are made capable of receiving it. The converted senses, the bodily senses
transformed into spiritual ones, comprehend the incarnate and resurrected
188 The Flesh
Word in another mode than the apostles, though not without some like-
ness. Thus says Hans Urs von Balthasar, rightly: “In his plight and guilt, our
fellow-man as we encounter him is in every case our neighbor, and this neigh-
bor of man’s is Christ. In his neighbor man encounters his Redeemer with all
his bodily senses, in just as concrete, unprecedented and archetypal a manner
as the Apostles when they ‘found the Messiah’ ” (Jn. 1:41).71 Seeing God in
one’s brother, tasting him in the Eucharist, hearing him in his Word, touch-
ing him in prayer, and smelling him in the aroma of incense, are all so many
ways of putting the senses and thus the “entire man” (totum hominem) in the
service of the sensible appearance of God. That which is no longer possible,
namely, a material comprehension of the body of God, of which Tertullian
worked to show the “solidity” (chap. 5), nevertheless remains for us today
under another form: our “converted flesh” or our bodily senses transformed
into spiritual ones.
After Origen and before Ignatius of Loyola, a capital text of the Brevilo-
quium makes of the continued apprehension of the Word by the senses the
very place of the lived experience of faith, for fidelity to the flesh is the unique
identity proper to the Christian message: “When man possesses the spiritual
senses [sensus spirituales], he sees [videtur] the supreme beauty of Christ
under the aspect of his Splendor [Splendoris], he hears [auditur] the sover-
eign harmony under the aspect of the Word [Verbi], he tastes [gustatur] the
sovereign sweetness under the aspect of Wisdom [Sapientiae] . . . , he smells
[odoratur] the sovereign scent under the aspect of the Word inspired in the
heart [Verbi inspirati in corde], and he embraces [astringitur] the sovereign
sweetness under the aspect of the incarnate Word [Verbi incarnati].”72 See-
ing the splendor of Christ, hearing his Word, tasting his wisdom, smelling
his inspiration and touching his incarnation are so many acts or modalities
of apprehension of God which pertain to the ordinary Christian life. To say,
with Karl Rahner, that “there is something artificial about wanting to dis-
cover for each sense a particular object, a special ratio by which it attains
the Word,” is to fail to recognize that the integration of the totality of the
human senses to the apprehension of the uncreated, inspired and incarnate
Word touches, as it were, on the essential.73 The Pauline imperative of a pleni-
tude of the divinity of Christ dwelling “bodily” (sômatikos) in us (Col. 2:9)
ought here to be taken literally. In the sensible apprehension of God we do
not flee earth for heaven, nor do we just classify different manners of human
relation to the divine. On the contrary, we are here immersed all the more
in the “sensual” in order there to read the presence of the “spiritual.” In this
“sinking-burying”[enfoncement-emfouissement] the truth of the incarnation
in its kenosis is articulated, as well as of the Resurrection in its manifestation.
Even today we can see and hear the uncreated Word (videre et audire), smell
the inspired Word (odorare), taste and touch the incarnate Word (gustare
et astringere), if we make a gift of our own senses to God so that he can
form them together with our desire to know the one who first transformed
or converted us: “The spiritual senses absolutely do not constitute a second

and more elevated power beyond the physical senses . . . rather, by them the
Christian definitively acquires his Christian senses which, of course, are none
‘other’ than the bodily senses, but these senses insofar as they have been
formed according to the form of Christ.”74
It is still necessary to be made fit for such a conversion or conformation.
Otherwise said, it is not sufficient to be attached to terrestrial things in order
to enter into the “sensation of the divine.” The sensible sometimes lends itself
to the sensational, which forgets its necessary metamorphosis. The confor-
mation of the “bodily senses” to the “spiritual senses,” however radical, does
not lead to their fusion, and even less their confusion. Thus it is necessary to
distinguish what we have considered up to this point in a unified structure
apart from its content: the bodily senses on one side and the spiritual senses
on the other. A poor use of the sensible—what we will call “diabolical”—
corresponds to the good use of the sensible, or the “symbolical.” It is possible
that one could be incapable of reading God in creatures and of apprehending
the Word according to a converted use of the senses. In this case, though in
this case alone, sensation more than imagination becomes the “mistress of
error and falsehood,” only worthy of distrust.
The Diabolical, or the Bad Use of the Sensible. Let us be careful here.
One’s attachment to the senses does not work without a conversion of the
senses—otherwise one courts the opposite risk of confounding the sensible
apprehension of God with the sensory enjoyment [jouissance] of things.
The spiritualism of the doctrine of the spiritual senses, without ever leaving
sensation (as I have already indicated), is not equated with the hedonistic
possession of beings. If the doctrine of the spiritual senses gives way to the
“metaphysical Desire which tends toward the totally other thing, the absolute
other,” hedonism feeds on a “need” which can never be fulfilled.75 It is hardly
here a question of the possession of the world, in a relation all the more
perverse as it lives on through the single mode of inveiglement [captation],
though only of the carnal experience. In the face of such a mistake, Bonaven-
ture warns of the danger in the Soliloquium, inviting the reader not to flee
sensation but rather to protect it when it is not conformed to the “figure” of
the incarnate Word: “Alas! Lord,” he confesses in the midst of this interior
dialogue, “I understand now but I blush as I confess it: the beauty, the form of
creatures has deceived my eyes [species et decor creaturarum decepit oculum
meum]; I could not conceive that you were sweeter than honey . . . O Jesus,
source of universal piety and sweetness, forgive me if in the creature I did not
recognize your inestimable sweetness equal to honey, if I did not taste it in
the interior love of my soul . . . The perfume of the creature seduced my sense
of smell [decepit odor creaturae olfactum meum], and I did not know your
perfume . . . Forgive me if I have only so late cast myself into the pursuit of its
traces. Finally the deceptive voice of creatures has charmed my ear [decepit
190 The Flesh
sonus fallax creaturarum auditum meum] and I have hardly tasted how fresh
are your words on the lips of your chosen ones, how sweet are your coun-
sels to the ears of those who love you . . . And, to crown my condemnation,
worldly weakness deceived my poor senses [carnis mollities tactum meum
nimis miserabiliter decipiebat], and I have ignored all the sweetness of your
embraces, O good Jesus, all the honesty of your attractions, all the delights
of union with you.”76
Despite the devotion, the danger he speaks of here is that of captivation
(captation). One would wrongly confound the beauty of a landscape with
the splendor of God, the tasting of honey with the taste of the Eucharist, the
perfume of a flower with wafting incense, the siren songs of creatures with
the chant of praise, and the lust of the flesh with the divine embrace. If the
symbol requires that we rest with sensation without immediately surpassing
it, the “good use” of the sensible ought nevertheless to prevent its “bad use,”
the symbolical protect against the diabolical, and the conversion of the senses
ought not to be confounded with simple sensation. The kenotic burying of
God in the sensible does not indicate an absorption of the believer in his
sensations; yet neither does the condescension of the divine occur without
a certain elevation of the human: “No man is worthy of acceding to this
sovereign good which transcends all the limits of nature, unless God, in his
condescension [Deo condescendente sibi] elevates man beyond himself [ele-
vetur ipse supra se].”77 Briefly, a sort of “reduction” or epochê of the sensible
ought to be effected here, no longer after the manner of Eckhart’s disobjec-
tification of the world in the relation of the Creator to his creature (as in
the sermon on Martha and Mary, chap. 3, supra), but rather in the properly
Bonaventurian fashion of opening up sensation from its blind enjoyment
[jouissance] and recognizing at the very heart of its bounty the true joy of the
one who provides it for us. Balthasar says of Bonaventure: “The renunciation
of an autonomous, acquisitive experiencing is the only preparation possible
for the experiences which the Word of inspiration wishes to mediate itself.”78
Dying with Christ, our senses themselves resurrect in some sense with him.
The affair here is certainly theological, but is no less aesthetic and philo-
sophical. Art is in fact nothing but another possible and derivative mode
of the conversion of the senses, so that a Paul Klee, as we have seen, will
sense himself, much like Saint Francis, “looked upon by things” more than
he is actually seeing them. But Christianity makes of this “conversion” of
our sensible apprehension of the world the locus of a true “metamorphosis”
or “transformation.” It is not sufficient, as far as Christianity is concerned,
to change oneself in order to see things anew. It is rather necessary to be
changed, or better, transformed by another who gives me the gift of sens-
ing and experiencing even the very same way he experiences and thus in an
exchange of consent and even of sensations for which the presence of the
Son in me attains mystical and philosophical summits rarely reached: “Let
this attitude [ressenti] be in you [hoc enim sentite in vobis] which is also the
attitude [ressenti] of Jesus Christ [quod et in Christo Jesu]” (Phil. 2:25). It

is not therefore that our body dies and our soul resurrects alone, according
to an all too common conception of Christianity. But rather “our senses,
together with images and thoughts, must die with Christ and descend to the
underworld in order to rise unto the Father” (Balthasar).79 The crossing of
the ford, as it were, is necessary in order to bring about the passage from
the purely human bodily senses to the spiritual senses converted in Christ.
This passage, as I will now show, through “the gate of the five senses” (per
portas quinque sensuum), marks the threshold where the Resurrected One
transforms our apprehension of the world, even to the point of making us see
in the stigmata of brother Francis the full carnal expression of the very thing
that is impressed there.
The Limit Experience of the Stigmata
The limit experience of Francis’s stigmata ought not to be restricted to pure

devotion, nor be allowed to slide into some kind of mysticism or irrational-
ism. As we know, the event has surely been used to support the attribution
of sanctity to the founder of the Franciscans. Yet the fervor attached to the
event (an event which it is not my intent to judge) has sometimes a level of
Dolorism that we ought to be on guard against. Bonaventure, the humble
interpreter of Saint Francis’s life (Legenda major), proposes a reading that
is theological rather than Dolorist, and confessional more than devotional:
“He came to be totally transformed [totum transformandum] into the like-
ness of Christ crucified, not through the martyrdom of his body [non per
martirium carnis] but through the burning love of his soul [sed per incidium
mentis].” The essential thing is clarified in the middle of the thirteenth cen-
tury (1263) some forty years after the death of Francis in 1226: the meaning
[sens] of the stigmata resides not in its Dolorism but in its exemplarism.
What matters here is the “impression in the flesh” (imprimere in carne) and
the “complete transformation” (totum transformandum), much more than
acts of suffering and devotion: “Then the vision disappeared,” continues the
exegete Bonaventure, “leaving in the heart of brother Francis a marvelous
ardor, but not without also impressing on his flesh some marks just as mar-
velous. At this moment in fact there appeared [apparere] in his hands and
feet the traces of the nails such as he came to see them in this crucified man.”
Now we reach the object of the present study: the “conversion of the flesh”
in Bonaventure ought to be seen as making visible, in the bodily experience
of the saint, the very thing that was said and lived in the experience of the
conversion of the senses. We cannot therefore reduce this conversion of the
flesh to some simple “mental perceptions of contemplated truth,” since this
transformation of the bodily into the spiritual first had to constitute the pri-
mary experience even for that which is most commonly shared: the vision of
192 The Flesh
God in the neighbor, tasting him in the Eucharist, hearing him in the word,
and so on. But the doctrine of the spiritual senses will now be extended to
a kind of experience (the stigmata) which discloses, even in a wounded and
transformed flesh, the action of the Resurrected One in a possible but rare
divine-human encounter [corps-à-corps]. Though refraining, through a sort
of epochê as we emphasized above, from judging here of the stigmata’s effec-
tiveness (quid), the manner in which Bonaventure describes it (quomodo)
will show that the passage of God through the “gate of the five senses” opens
and reveals a new space for which the body itself marks the horizon of its
visibility as much as of its transformation.
The Gate of the Five Senses

The Transit. Metaphysics in Bonaventure is a “passage” (meta-phusis), and
not a simple “break” or “leap.” Like the later “mystics of excess” Jean-Joseph
Surin and Meister Eckhart, the true residence of the itinerant monk is always
a “transit,” a “movement toward” rather than a “remaining there,” and hence
a “hodology” more than an “ontology.”80 Hence the Itinerarium says to the
reader or the one following the retreat of the “three days walk into the des-
ert”: “Considering the universe as a mirror through which we pass to God
[per quod transeamus ad Deum], we will thus become true Hebrews passing
[transeuntes] from Egypt to the land of promise, and true Christians passing
with Christ [cum Christo transeuntes] from this world to the Father.”81 The
experience of the passage through the senses, in a truly Christian and there-
fore incarnate mysticism, thus marks the traversal of the phusis (meta-phusis)
rather than the flight into another world (metaphysics).
The “gate of the five senses,” as the threshold required at the heart of the
intimacy through which God enters and reveals himself to man, is enough in
fact to allow the divine to enter the depths of the human and to indwell that
which we would have thought to have kept safely under guard: our senses
themselves. “Man, or the microcosm, has five senses that are like five gates
[quasi quinque portas], where the knowledge of all sensible beings penetrates
[intrat] into the soul. Through the vision enter [per visum intrant] the celes-
tial and luminous bodies and every colored object; through touch, the solid
and terrestrial bodies. The three intermediaries: taste for liquids, hearing for
impressions in the air, smell for vapors which result from a mixture of humid-
ity, air, fire or heat, as we see in the perfume that emits its aromas.”82 Each sense
pertains to a certain category of objects: celestial and luminous bodies for
vision; solid and terrestrial bodies for touch; liquids for taste, and so on. These
are less the things themselves than their impressions received by the senses that
“penetrate into the soul” (intrant in animam). There is certainly nothing very
original here, at least as far as Greek anthropology goes, whether Platonic or
Aristotelian.83 But the power and exemplarity of the doctrine of Bonaventure
is found in the fact that beyond the normal working of our sensory organs,
the Word himself, in being made flesh, becomes himself the “gate” (per portas)
through which the bodily senses are converted into spiritual ones.
A True Heart to Heart (Coeur à Coeur). The experience of the contempla-

tion of the cross as well as Eucharistic adoration rises up in the teaching of
Bonaventure as the emblematic figure by which this “Christian alchemy” of
the conversion of the senses is accomplished. In it our “divine sensorium”
is properly speaking transformed for it is through it that our bondage to
sensible things dies and there is resurrected in its place a converted and open
mode of our senses. Bonaventure counsels some Franciscan sisters on spiri-
tual retreat (De perfectione vitae ad sorores): “Consecrated souls: approach!
Carried by your love approach Jesus covered in wounds, Jesus crowned with
thorns . . . With the apostle Thomas, do not merely put your finger in the
scars and your hand in his side, but by way of the gate opened at his side
[per ostium lateris], penetrate all the way to his Heart [ingredere usque ad
cor ipsius Iesu]. There, transformed in him by the ardor of your love for the
crucified Divine [ibique ardentissimo crucifixi amore in Christum transfor-
mata] . . . await no other consolation than the capacity to die on the cross
with Jesus Christ [cum Christo in cruce mori]. Along with the apostle, you
will shout: ‘I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live but
Christ lives in me’ ” (Gal. 2:20).84
The “heart” of the crucified, “wounded and open,” will lend itself in two
ways to the “transformation in Christ” (in Christum transformata) of the
bodily senses into the spiritual senses.
(a) As “heart”: this organ, pierced by the thrust of the lance, is revealed
in all flesh, for Christ as for man, to be the “center of the microcosm” just
as the sun is the “center of the macrocosm”: medium maioris mundi est sol,
medium minoris est cor.85 When the heart that is pierced is Christ’s—who
is the “center” of all creation and “in whom is hidden all the treasures of
wisdom and the knowledge of God”86—it is the “heart of the heart” that is
pierced, the heart of the Word who is the heart of the world and in whom
the world subsists. The “gate opened at his side” (per ostium lateris), seen
also by the disciples who beheld the one whom they had pierced (Jn. 19:37),
confers a Christian meaning on the “gate of the five senses” so that they
become the threshold of the “transformation” (transformata) of our love for
the “crucified Divine.” (b) As “wounded and open”: the heart of Christ on
the cross “spilling forth blood and water” is a sign and gift for the multitude
(Jn. 19:34). Starting from the heart (the incarnate Word) and spreading to the
entire creation contained in him is the gift of a transformed apprehension of
the sensible by way of the “transfigured” senses themselves.
A true heart to heart is performed between God and man, precisely when
he dies on the cross, inviting us to convert our senses. Although the carnal
wound of the heart of Christ is no longer “bodily visible” today as it was
for the witnesses on Golgotha, it is given, according to Bonaventure, to a
194 The Flesh
“spiritual perception” found in the believer’s ardor of love for the Resur-
rected (“by the open gate of his side, penetrate all the way to his heart. There,
transformed in him by the ardor of your love for the crucified Divine . . .”).
Thus this mysterious and no less real “conversion of the senses” bears value
for the Christian of every age. Nothing on Golgotha would have been seen in
this open heart but the “organ” (carnally wounded by the soldier’s lance), if
his authentically and definitively spiritual nature would not have manifested
the ardor of a love, like that of the fiancé of the Song of Songs, the Spouse
put on the cross, even that of the Father himself: “His heart was wounded so
that, through the visible wound [per vulnus visibile], this invisible love would
become visible to us [vulnus amoris invisibile videamus] . . . The carnal
wound [carnale vulnus] therefore reveals a spiritual wound [vulnus spirituale
ostendit] as it is said in the Song of Songs: ‘You have wounded my heart, O
my sister, my fiancée, you have wounded my heart . . .’ It is as if the Spouse
meant to say: because you wounded me in the ardor of your love [quia zelo
amoris tui vulnerasti], I was also struck by the lance of the soldier [lancea
quoque militis vulneratus sum].”87
In itself and starting from itself, the original and invisible vulnerability of
the heart of God (vulnus amor invisibilis) is shown (ostendit) in the “heart
of Jesus” pierced on the cross, by way of the visible wound on his side (per
vulnus visibile). The body (the pierced heart) returns to the spiritual (the
compassionate heart) without surpassing it. If there is indeed a prompt to the
“conversion” of the believer’s senses, or a passage from the bodily senses to
the spiritual senses (conformitas) in an identical “mode of being” (analogia),
this only indicates the opposite of a flight into some kind of disincarnate mys-
ticism. This “conversion” in the mode of apprehension of the object, purified
by the “bracketing” of the direct knowledge of the sensible, turns me to the
“ardor of the Father’s love” who desires a relationship with me as his crea-
ture. What I sense is not first myself sensing the suffering Christ (in a sort
of Dolorism far removed from the true message of the cross), but rather the
communion of love between the Father and Son, moving from the spiritual
vulnerability of the heart of God to its sign and iconic presence in the wound
of his side on the cross. The inversion-conversion of the senses produced here
in the passage from the bodily senses to the spiritual senses across an identi-
cal mode of being thus consists no more in the vision of the bodily in order to
pass over wholly to the spiritual (as if the simple vision of the crucifix ought
to carry me into a mystical ecstasy). Instead, it consists in living from the spir-
itual in order to read it in the bodily. “Touched by God” in his carnal death to
his own captivation by the senses, I come with him to “touch the world” with
senses converted by dint of crossing the ford of the “gate of the five senses.”
The heart to heart [coeur à coeur] is accomplished here by touching bodies
[corps à corps] even to the point of discovering a meaning [sens] of the flesh
which is not related to either the substantial or accidental dimensions, in
order to describe this mystical experience of the stigmata of brother Francis.
The Disciple Touching and Touched. Returning here to a practice of phenom-

enology justified by medieval philosophy, the “flesh” as “concrete emblem of
a manner of being in general” appears here in the form of the contemplation
of the cross as the very place of the conversion of the senses. Neither the
body alone nor the soul alone, nor even the unique face of the “sensing body”
(phenomenal body), nor the “sensed body” (objective body) constitutes the
experience of the body as such. Only the intersection of the two marks the
limit of sensing and the sensed, the “coiling over the visible and the seen body,
and of the tangible and the touched body.”88 Reappropriating the famous
Husserlian chiasm of the “touching-touched” (Ideas II, §36), we can observe
that the believer contemplating the heart of Christ wounded “in his flesh” on
the cross does not therefore only look at himself seeing in a pure phenomenal
intentional aim (risking closing himself in the sadly famous solipsism from
which phenomenology must endeavor to be extricated), nor does he uniquely
see Christ suffering in a unilaterally objective intentional aim (remaining then
only the powerless spectator of a “representation” that hardly concerns him).
Thus commenting on the fifth of the Cartesian Meditations, Marc Richier
emphasizes that “there is in the apperception of the other this immediate
apprehension that ‘I live my life’ and not the other’s, and yet I am not a solus
ipse closed in on itself, but an ipse which is phenomenologically open in its
life and time, to the life and time of the other.”89 By contrast to a subjectivist
solipsism and a pure objectifying spectacle (one being only the inverse of the
other), in the contemplation of Christ on the cross, the “flesh of Christ,” at
least as “flesh of the other,” is seen as the limit of the visible and invisible,
participating as a “texture” of my own flesh and the flesh of the world. A
mysterious “chiastic” relation of “interlacing,” according to which I do not
suffer as he does although he does not suffer without me, happens here where
the believer and suffering Christ are tied together in an intercorporeity that
can neither be “explained” nor “analyzed,” only “described”: “For the first
time, through the other body, I see that, in its coupling with the flesh of the
world, the body contributes more than it receives, adding to the world that I
see the treasure necessary for what the other body sees.”90 This statement by
Merleau-Ponty would not at all be rejected by Bonaventure the Franciscan.
Thus it is not only “the same” of my own power to espouse things that I
here experience through “touching,” albeit spiritually, the Word on the cross
(through my wounded brother, for example), but the enigma of this fourth
term which means that, in the interlacing of our worlds, I touch him not
only touching myself, nor only himself touched or the capacity to touch him,
but also touching himself or touching me in a way I could not reach on my
own.91 To say it otherwise, and recognizing that it would require more ample
development, “touching Christ on the cross” is less touching Christ himself
or touching myself touching him, than it is touching him touching me and
touching the world. I have already quoted Bonaventure’s apperceptive trans-
position with the body of Christ: “Because you have wounded me with the
196 The Flesh
ardor of your love [quia zelo amoris tui vulnerasti], I was also struck by the
lance of the soldier [lancea quoque militis vulneratus sum].”92 Touched objec-
tively (objective body, the sensed Christ), Christ on the cross is revealed thus
phenomenally touching (phenomenal body, the sensing Christ). This chiasm
of the sensed and sensing in the very person of the Word incarnate reveals
to me how touching him “spiritually” but “in a bodily manner” I am first
myself also touched in the manner in which he touches me. What returns me
to myself is thus not the blow of the lance which only leaves us in the pure
spectacle of an invisibility both blind and ignorant to its own meaning [sens],
but rather the ardor of my love rooted in the excess of the Father’s. Every
danger of anachronism aside, the phenomenological reading of the “touching-
t ouched” at the very center of the relation of intercorporeity of man and God
in Bonaventure recalls that the “primacy of touch” finds in the Franciscan
tradition one of its most proper expressions: “Man embraces [astringitur]
the sovereign sweetness under the aspect of the Word incarnate, dwelling in
us bodily [corporaliter] and letting itself be touched, caressed, embraced by
us [reddentis se nobis palpabile, osculabile, amplexabile] through the ardent
charity which, by excess and transport, makes our spirit pass from this world
to the Father.”93
Against the Greek and even Augustinian tradition, the ordinary ladder of
the senses is inverted: the inferior sense, touch, is understood here to be the
most appropriate in Christian experience in the embrace of the Word, while
the most elevated sense, vision, becomes again all the more common as it
puts at a distance the world that it intends and sees. Because for the Seraphic
master “the earth has been chosen as the center of the world and of the mani-
festations of divine grace” (Balthasar),94 the passage from the macrocosm
to the microcosm like that from the bodily senses to the spiritual senses is
enacted starting from the sense of touch and without ever leaving the earth.
The word of the Apostle Thomas, “If I do not see the marks of the nails in his
hands, and if I do not place my finger in them, and if I do not place my hand
in his side, I will not believe” (Jn. 20:25), no longer sees the heart open and
wounded simply as the crucible for the transformation of the senses, but first
sees the unsurpassable and irreducible experience of touching as that which
“gives flesh” in phenomenology and theology to the world and to being.
Such is the ultimate meaning [sens] of the cross, being at once, according
to Bonaventure, “center” and “passage”—the pole starting from which the
phenomena are seen and liberated. “Everything is manifested on the cross
[omnia in cruce manifestantur] . . . Thus the cross is the key [clavis], gate
[porta], way and splendor of the truth [via et splendor veritatis].”95
But is it necessary to remain at the cross, even as it is the center and heart
of all phenomenality? According to the hypothesis of a flesh as “concrete
emblem of a manner of being in general,” does the “de-figured” Christ not
call man to take on his form? And if “taking [his] form” means more than a
simple act of representation, does that mean that this flesh of Christ—from
crucified and open to resurrected and offered—is also able to give to man the
“definitive obtainment of his Christian senses”?96 The Franciscan experience
of the stigmata precisely indicates its value and its possibility. The luminous
rays of the stigmata of brother Francis on La Verna, the very place the winged
Seraphim appeared in the form of the cross, indeed make visible in all the reli-
gious representations of the event (Giotto, Lorenzo, Gozzoli, etc.) this strange
divine-human encounter [corps à corps]. The lines traced on the fresco or
the canvas make visible this intercorporeity of the two wounded bodies of
the Seraphim and brother Francis according to a representation which, in
Giotto for example, directly refers to the Legenda major of Bonaventure.
Feet and hands pierced and side opened, something happens or at the least
is expressed in a carnal language so appropriately Christian that it remains
even today as the type of word principally used by the incarnate Word to
articulate our own flesh always formed by him.97
The Stigmata of Brother Francis

On La Verna. As I have already mentioned, short of the question of its effec-
tivity (quid), the phenomenon of the stigmata describes the how (quomodo),
or the modality of a God who is “impressed” and “expressed” in the flesh of
man. The “interlacing” of the flesh of the crucified Seraph with the stigma-
tized Francis serves as the key to a new phenomenological elucidation of the
human flesh (phenomenological incarnation) interwoven with the flesh of
God (theological incarnation). Bonaventure, who from the beginning of the
Itinerarium followed the steps of Francis on La Verna, is made the interpreter
of the vision of the “winged seraph in the form of the cross” and of the “man-
ifest” stigmatization of the saint: “There on La Verna, where I meditated on
the elevations of the soul to God, I recall, among other things, the miracle that
occurred to St. Francis himself: the vision [de visione] of the winged seraph in
the form of the cross. But it seems to me as soon as this vision represented the
rapture of the blessed father that it indicated the itinerary to follow in order
to get there . . . This itinerary [itinerarium] to be followed is nothing but the
ardent love of the crucified [ardentissimum amorem Crucifixi] . . . This love
so impregnates the soul of St. Francis that it finishes by showing through
his flesh [in carne patuit] when he carried about in his body [in corpore suo
deportavit] the sacred stigmata of the Passion the two last years of his life.”98
Impression and Expression. The opening of the Itinerarium explicitly teaches

what I suggest concerning corporeity and the expression in it of the flesh of
the Resurrected. The stigmatized “body” (corpus), like a simple, wounded
substance lets the “flesh” (caro) appear in the figure of the saint, the trans-
parency or “manifestation” of his love for the crucified. Flesh and body: the
mystical duality here does not precisely correspond to the simple phenome-
nological bipartition of Leib and Körper (as we have already noted in regards
198 The Flesh
to Tertullian above). Yet what is given here to see as “flesh” in Saint Francis
marks the manifestation of his internal lived experience (impregnated love
in his soul), while his “body” only refers to the trace of this physical pain
[douleur] to which, in addition, it gives meaning [sens] (the sacred stigmata).
Therefore his flesh expresses (patuit) what his body only bore (deportavit).
Without pushing this analogy of the mystical and the phenomenological any
further, Bonaventure’s theological rereading of the experience of the stigmata
reveals in the “flesh” of Francis the very expression of that which his “soul”
sees, even rendering visible as a trace on his “body” “the very ardent love of
the crucified” (ardentissimum amorem Crucifixi). Let me repeat then that his
flesh expresses (exprimit) that which is impressed (impressit) on his body.
Inheriting this from Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure takes up and reworks
his “positive optic on the flesh” (Brague). The “flesh,” at once “resolution of
continuity,” “consciousness of finitude and mortality,” and “affection of the
self by the self,” is certainly the body as sensible and mortal but precisely as
it makes visible this fragility and mortality. One can therefore speak of the
“resurrection of the body” in theology, even in phenomenology, inasmuch as
it is made plain that our incorruptibility in patria (the body—corpus) fully
inherits the lived experience of our mortality in via (the flesh—caro).99
The stigmata on the body of brother Francis finds its meaning [sens] only
when it manifests the fragility and vulnerability of his flesh, and is thus sen-
sible to the internal lived experience of his relation to the Crucified more than
to the suffering that it makes visible. The flesh of the disciple first reveals his
love for his master (and not some hypothetical dolor) in order to resemble
him, just as certain people today let show through their flesh, facial expres-
sion, or look an affection which overflows them and then illumines them
through and through. Thus Hans Urs von Balthasar: “The stigmata were
branded on the body precisely while the soul was in ecstatic rapture: it is
when the form of the divine beauty is seen that this divine beauty receives its
form in the world. For Bonaventure, it is vital that ecstasy, even in its Diony-
sian aspects, is not a flight out of the world that leaves it behind, but rather
the opening of the world for God, or more precisely the revelation of the fact
that the world has already been grasped by God.”100 So there is no mysti-
cism of flight from the world in Bonaventure—no more than in Christianity
in general. On the contrary, the hidden becomes progressively manifest, by
striking the gate of the five senses and the body in general in order to be
revealed by the flesh.
First secretly “impressed” (absorbuit) in his heart by contemplation—
Bonaventure thus tells the sisters of Lonchamp “put Jesus crucified as a stamp
on your heart . . . just as a stamp is impressed on hot wax”101—love, impreg-
nating the soul of the saint, becomes suddenly visible or “manifest” (patuit) to
those who witness the scene of the reception of the stigmata. Such is the sense
of the “expressive and impressive” appearance of the winged Seraph in the
form of the cross to blessed Francis and which will later gain for Bonaventure
the title of the Seraphic Doctor. Bonaventure said that “this expressive and
impressive appearance [expressa et impressa] of the Seraph to blessed Francis
showed that this order should correspond to brother Francis.”102 When love,
“impressed” in the heart (transformation of the senses in the crucible of the
contemplation of the cross), is “expressed” in the flesh (the miracle of the
stigmata), the bodily senses are thus made simultaneously the most spiritual
and the most sensible. They are made the most spiritual because contempla-
tion requires a “good use of the sensible” by the conversion of the senses and
the most sensible because the visibility of the stigmata is given to be read in
the “interlacing” of two fleshes, the unsurpassable intercorporeity of the flesh
of the resurrected Christ and the flesh of the transformed Francis.
A Union Neither Accidental nor Shameful. Apart from the metaphysical

quarrel of hylomorphism, which has no bearing on the mystical experience
of stigmatization, Bonaventure’s surprisingly unified and integral anthropol-
ogy founds this relation of “impression-expression” of the soul to the body
in the figure of Francis. Far from a simple bipolarity of bodily and animated
substances, or of a purely accidental composition of the spiritual and bodily,
the soul and body in this experience of the stigmata disclose their interac-
tion more than their superposition, their chiasm rather than their substance:
“The action whereby the soul unites itself with the human body and gives
it life,” says Bonaventure in an important passage from his Commentary on
the Sentences, “is neither accidental nor shameful. It is not accidental [non
accidentalem] because the soul is the substantial form in the body. It is not
shameful [et non ignobilem] because in the body the soul becomes the noblest
of all the forms, and all the longing struggle of nature finds its goal in this
soul. For the human body possesses the noblest constitution and organiza-
tion that exist in nature [nobilissima complexione et organizatione quae sit
in natura], and therefore it finds its fulfillment only in the noblest form or
nature. The character of the soul through which she is able to be united [uni-
bilis] to a body is something that touches what is most essential to her and is
the most excellent character in the soul.”103
The stigmata thus makes this substantial unity of soul and body appear—
albeit as a carnal lived experience more than a metaphysical composition. It
can even serve as tangible proof of such a unity, if necessary. Neither “acci-
dental” nor “shameful,” their connection is for Bonaventure more noble than
each alone, and counted among “the most noble things” (nobilissima), which
includes the necessary complex “body” itself that welcomes and reveals this
very spiritual activity of the soul—the ardent love of Francis for the Crucified.
Said otherwise, because this Bonaventurian mysticism philosophically inter-
rogated has no other end than to convert our own sensible manner of being
in the world, an activity of the soul or a lover not wholly given over to being
made visible in the lived experience of our flesh would remain for Bonaven-
ture unworthy of our state as creatures. Our bodies, made to manifest God
200 The Flesh
like the incarnate Word, have no other end than to reveal this other visibility.
Therefore, Bonaventure highlights in the Breviloquium that there appears
here a certain “demand [exigente] for the future resurrection of the body”:
“Our soul will only be fully blessed [plene beatua] at the instant that its body
will be restored [restituatur] to it because it possesses a natural and innate
tendency to be inserted within it.”104 Thus the chiasm of these two substances
in our future state of resurrection depends on the interlacing, or here the
insertion (insertam) of our soul in our body today. Here the carnal relation
becomes temporal in the sense that our capacity physically to phenomenalize
God here below underwrites belief, and makes credible its possible manifes-
tation in our body in the beyond. Perhaps the role of the body in revealing
the meaning [sens] of the relation of the believer with the Resurrected is too
often forgotten. Christians have progressively failed to exhibit its visibility,
“to write on their faces the glad tidings of the Bible,” and to allow in them-
selves “a new Bible in continuous course of creation,” as Nietzsche famously
said.105 We will never finish converting and being converted in our own flesh,
if we now accept (according to the initial guideline of this work) to see God
by means of our senses and to touch him today. If not its very efficacy Francis
has at least demonstrated its ultimate possibility: “The impressio of the stig-
mata is the mark of God in the sensible world.”106
The Blessedness of the Flesh. “Flesh in the flesh” (caro secundum carnem)
in order to be truly a man—Bonaventure announces in a remarkable sermon
on the nativity (“Sermon 2”)—the Word is also made “flesh apart from the
flesh” (caro praeter carnem) in order to avoid corruption, “flesh above the
flesh” (caro supra carnem) for a marvelous operation, “flesh against the flesh”
(caro contra carnem) for its own purification, and “flesh for the flesh” (caro
propter carnem) in view of final salvation.107 Far from denigrating the flesh,
the Franciscan doctor establishes it as the guiding thread of the economy
of salvation—from the Incarnation (flesh in the flesh) to the Resurrection
(flesh for the flesh). In the act of “conversion” that avoids corruption (flesh
apart from the flesh) and awaits its perfection (flesh against the flesh), the
flesh becomes for man, by the mediation of God, a sort of “spectacle that
renders our nature blessed” (spectaculum ut naturam beatificaret): “Behold,”
concludes the Seraphic Doctor, “why he was made flesh: to render blessed
the soul and the flesh [ut animam et carnem beatificaret], which merits for
him praise and glory.”108 The glorification of the flesh is therefore not solely
reserved for a beyond, which is as distant as it is impenetrable, even though it
finds its perfect realization in this very “beyond.” There is, for Bonaventure,
a blessedness of being in the flesh and living in the flesh from here below that
all the deceptions of the sensible realm will not be able to lead astray if it is
the case that our senses are not left to mislead us. “In my flesh I will see my
God” says the Book of Job (Job 19:26) which, in Bonaventure, takes on an
original meaning: no vision of God will be complete if, on the one hand, “we
do not penetrate into the Word [ingredietur ad Verbum] by contemplation of
his divinity,” and, on the other hand, “we do not go out to the flesh [et egredi-
etur ad carnem] by the consideration of his humanity.”109
The “conversion of the flesh” in Bonaventure (chap. 6) not only indicates
the optional term to the “solidity of the flesh” in Tertullian (chap. 5) and the
“visibility of the flesh” in Irenaeus (chap. 4). On the contrary, it marks the
accomplishment of an economy of salvation, which has no other end than
that of making an address to us and to our very corporeity in “the pattern of
the one who lives in the flesh” (exemplum viventum in carne).110 That which
was revealed in the “formation” of Adam (Irenaeus) and totally assumed by
Christ in the betrothal of our “sister the flesh” (Tertullian) now appears as
“transformed” in order to give to the disciple in his own bodily experience
the capacity to read something of the carnal experience of God (Bonaven-
ture): “The manner is obvious [patet etiam] by which God is hidden [lateat]
in the interior of all the objects of sensation and knowledge,” concludes
Bonaventure at the terminus of the vast movement of leading all things back
[reconduction] in the De reductione artium ad theologiam.111
Neither the manifestation of God preparing his reception either as “relation”

(Augustine) or “phenomenon” (Erigena), or as “detachment” (Eckhart) [part
I], nor his incorporation as flesh in its “visibility” (Irenaeus), its “solidity”
(Tertullian), and by its “conversion” (Bonaventure) [part II], is sufficient to
speak the whole of Christian experience. One does not pass all alone to God,
even by his own body transfigured and converted by “the very ardent love of
the crucified” (Saint Francis). The experience of the “other” [part III] brings
to completion the “manifest God” [part I] as well as his “incorporated flesh”
[part II]. The three—God, the flesh, and the other—only deliver, so to speak,
a single and same reality, forming the different facets of a unique act of dona-
tion of God to man and of reception of God by man. At the end of the road
only the path taken will be measured, thus to render us inexcusable “with the
other” [part III] for not always seeing him, yet only when all has been done
to enlighten us, both on the part of our vision of God [part I] as on our sensa-
tion of the divine [part II]: “The one who is not illumined by created things,
is a blind man [caecus est]. The one who is not woken up by so many cries is
deaf [surdus est]. The one who is not pressed to praise God by all his works is
a mute [mutus est]. The one who is not forced to recognize the First Principle
by all the signs is an idiot [stultus est]. Open your eyes [aperi oculos], listen
with your soul [aures spirituals admove], loosen your lips [labia tu solve],
apply your heart [et cor tuum appone]: every creature will show you how to
understand, praise, love, serve, glorify and adore your God.”112
Part Three
The Other
204 The Other
Alterity Thematized
The notion that intersubjectivity and alterity were not thematized as such
until the dawn of the twentieth century is a scholarly commonplace. At best
medieval thought would exhibit a certain “sensibility for relation to the other”
but nothing more.1 This “platitude” certainly has its reasons and even its jus-
tification in the history of philosophy. The thought of the other is marked by
its origin: the constitution of subjectivity in Descartes, of which the danger of
closing in on itself in the famous solipsism leads to a fresh thinking of inter-
subjectivity in Husserl. Yet the following observation is still pertinent and
is, in fact, all the more massive as it cuts to the heart of a history of thought
that is nuanced to say the least. Patristic and medieval thought contain many
“hidden treasures” to be discovered, which a certain love affair with novelty
tends to forget. And I have already shown it in relation to God as source of
the ego (part I) and to the flesh as full manifestation of the divine in the den-
sity of our humanity (part II). Precisely because the divine acquires true status
as engendering subject (part I) and the flesh reveals its visibility as well as its
solidity (part II), we can no longer speak in the same old way about alterity
(part III). At least since Saint Augustine, such an observation is well known.
The metaphysical return to the ego (Descartes) finds its roots and its initial
motif in the mysticism of interiority: “Lo you were within [intus] but I out-
side [foris] searching there for you . . . You were with me [mecum eras] and
I was not with you [et tecum non eram].”2 Thus read the famous lines from
the Confessions. The philosophical question of alterity finds in the corpus of
theology a conceptuality that, if not the strongest, is at least the most original.
But there is much more to this philosophical reflection with theological
roots. For if the reflexive act of return to the self is rooted in the theological
conviction of a God present within (“it is no longer I who live,” says Saint
Paul, “but Christ lives within me” [Gal. 2:20]), the irruption of the other at
the heart of the self no longer escapes from the rule of an engendering of
the other with me at the heart of the Trinity itself. Whether it is a matter of
“community” (Origen, chap. 7), “alterity” (Aquinas, chap. 8) or “singular-
ity” (Duns Scotus, chap. 9), these different traits essential to contemporary
philosophy find their first outlines in patristic and medieval thought. If it is
of course permissible to treat the question of otherness independently of all
inquiry into the divine, then alterity as such nevertheless finds a true founda-
tion in the Divine Third. This has already been shown. “Condilectio” or the
devout love of the “third” reaches its height in the Trinitarian divine love
that no human reciprocity could ever match: “When a being gives its love to
another,” says Richard of Saint Victor in his De Trinitate, “and when it loves
the other alone, there is a dilectio, but not condilectio [sed condilectio non
est] . . . There is condilectio properly speaking [condilectio autem jure dicitur]
when two friends [the Father and Son] together love a third [the Holy Spirit]
in a harmony of dilectio [concorditer diligitur], a sociality of love [socialiter
The Other 205
amatur] where the affections of the two are unified in the fire of love that they
have for the third.”3 Things are utterly clear here. The thought of the other,
at least in the general context of our reasoning from reduction (part I: God),
and then from constitution (part II: the flesh), is not born independently of
the love of God in myself (part III: the other).
In this sense, but this sense alone, the “way” of the fifth Cartesian Medi-
tation of Husserl will inspire everything that follows, at least insofar as it
founds the question of intersubjectivity in phenomenology, and brings to
light for a new day patristic and medieval philosophy: first with Origen and
the thematic of the communion of saints as possible mode of community
(chap. 7), then Thomas Aquinas and the relation of one angel to another as
a harbinger of the relation of the ego to the alter ego (chap. 8), and finally
Duns Scotus and the haecceity of otherness—so well studied today—in order
to detect an identified mode of its singularity (chap. 9). Let us recall here
the Augustinian closing to this capital text of the Cartesian Meditations. In
this way we will pass straight to the evidence of this indispensable exchange
between medieval philosophy and phenomenology, especially insofar as the
question of alterity is concerned: noli foras ire, in te redi, in interiore homine
habitat veritas—“do not go far from yourself but rather enter within, for
there dwells the truth.”4
Chapter 7
Community and Intersubjectivity (Origen)
Communio Sanctorum
As I have already said, one could certainly find much to reproach in a con-
ception which finds everything new about phenomenology to be rooted in
certain historical modalities such as patristic and medieval philosophy by
hiding every innovation. The objection, if founded, does not see that it is a
result of a misinterpretation, taking as second that which is first (phenome-
nology) and first that which is second (medieval philosophy). Let me explain.
Patristic and medieval philosophy are not only the occasion for a phenom-
enology already constituted which would require of its modes of implication
only an ultimate verification. As I noted above, the “sealed source” of medi-
eval philosophy awaits its aggiorniamento, not by being phenomenology’s
flavor of the week but by virtue of its exemplarity for contemporary styles of
thought sometimes poorly founded in a veritable tradition. But we are inter-
rogating and discovering the tradition anew because we have eyes to see that
such is a much too facile approach to the tradition. In other words, far from
being satisfied with an application of phenomenology to medieval philoso-
phy, it should be first recognized that medieval philosophy itself is fat with
phenomenology already, even though only the phenomenological attitude as
such would make its birth and establishment possible. Concerning the ques-
tion of the “other” in particular (part III) and perhaps even more than the
questions of “God” (part I) or the “flesh” (part II), phenomenology at least as
a method appears with such a fructifying potentiality that it is apt to renew
virtually everything, and if not the reading of texts themselves, then at least
the interpretation of the authors under the urgent condition that they find
some meaning for us.
In this chapter what we indicate here will be seen in an exemplary way
through the guidance of Origen (especially his Homilies on Leviticus and
Homilies on Ezekiel), but with Bernard of Clairvaux as a necessary fulcrum
(especially his Commentary on the Canticle and treatise on the Love of
God). If community is a mode of intersubjectivity as Husserl says, or better,
if “being with” is a fundamental mode of “being self” as Heidegger says, then
207
208 The Other
the theological expectation of a final being together in the communion of

saints will have something to say to the philosophical search for a concept of
community that is not the simple aggregate of individuals. So Henry Creuzel
asks: “Before the moment of final resurrection comes, are the saints interested
in their brothers still on earth?”1
The question is not only theological. It is first and foremost philosophical
in the sense that our own egoity depends on intersubjectivity with the other
man. It is not at all here a simple question of the “self,” whether incorporated
in God or thought starting from God (part I); nor is it a question of the
flesh, however apt it is to be converted to God (part II). Rather it is a ques-
tion of the possibility for a community of humans to be rooted in the divine
in order to constitute in him and with him a new mode of unprecedented
intersubjectivity (part III). Said otherwise, the theological dogma of the com-
munion of saints is also a phenomenological hypothesis for the constitution
of otherness—if it is indeed the case that community, here with phenomenol-
ogy, as well as over there with theology—originally precedes all declaration
of egoity. “The originality of Husserl resides in this methodological progres-
sion from solipsism [solus ipse] to community [Vergemeinschaft],” says Paul
Ricoeur in relation to the father of phenomenology.2 And Origen says, “The
Apostles expect me also [et ego] to take part in their joy . . . For there is not
for them some perfect joy by which they would not be afflicted by our errors
[pro erroribus nostris dolen] and cry over our sins [et lugent nostra pec-
cata].”3 Passion in God as a capacity to “suffer with,” and intersubjectivity as
a mode of our “being with” thus make empathy and community the two priv-
ileged modes of an alterity that is philosophically (and definitively) founded.
Even more, the theological and existential inquiry into a possible empathy
between the living and the departed becomes here all the more important
because the doctrine of the communio sanctorum is not definitively fixed
with Origen in the third century; it does not yet appear in the Apostles Creed
(“I believe in the community of saints”), nor even, for that matter, in the
Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.4 Unaware of its formulation, perhaps Ori-
gen had unwittingly laid the foundation for a possible communio sanctorum
at the time when the proximity of the Parousia no longer seemed as clear as
it did in earlier times. This will be a gain for theology inasmuch as it makes
more precise its own conceptuality, and for philosophy as well, for there it
can discover the premises of an idea of community.
Suffering with: A Mode of Empathy
Passion
Intercorporeity, not only carnal but even spiritually converted in the appre-
hension of the Word made flesh (chap. 6: Bonaventure), is not sufficient in
Community and Intersubjectivity 209
itself to constitute a true intersubjectivity—even though, as we will see, it

does found community. Man is not only a body; he is also a multiplicity of
affects by which he experiences his body (Körper) as his own flesh (Leib). “A
totally foreign being can only be originally given by the medium of empa-
thy (Einfühlung).”5 In order to constitute a community (Vergemeinschaft),
or better, a communion of saints (communio sanctorum) more than a simple
apprehension of bodies is therefore necessary. Considering oneself as another
ought to make us capable of seeing the lived experience of the other, in rela-
tion to whom we are able to live “as if” (als ob) we were experiencing what
he himself experiences. In this condition alone (that is, the possible “apper-
ceptive transposition of otherness”), the dead take care of the living, the
living take care of the dead, and the divine takes care of the human. It would
therefore seem to be necessary that God is capable of experiencing what man
experiences—assuming all of human experience except sin, though taking on
himself its weight.
Passion in Man. In phenomenology, no proper experience is originally given

outside of the act of constitution: “One’s own experience is the essence of
experience.”6 In order to understand God, nothing is given to man except
precisely his own experience as man. Thus Origen rightly says, in his sixth
Homily on Ezekiel, interpreting the compassion of the Lord for Jerusalem
starting from human experience (Ez. 16:5): “I will borrow an example from
men [exemplum ab hominibus accipiam], and if the Holy Spirit helps me, I
will pass [transmigrabo] to Jesus Christ and God the Father.”7 The experi-
ence of man as described in this homily paradoxically deploys the modes of
an “empathy” (Einfühlung), the power of which has nothing to envy from
the long analyses of the modes of apprehension of the other from Dilthey or
Husserl: “When I address myself to a man and implore him to take pity on
me, if he is without mercy, he does not suffer [nihil patitur] from what I have
to say; but if he is a sensitive soul, if his heart is not severe or hardened, he
hears me, takes pity on me and he suffers viscerally [mollintur viscera eius]
by my prayers.”8
Beyond the “pathos of the self by God” (chap. 3: Eckhart) rendered visible
in a “soteriological flesh” (chap. 4: Tertullian), a “pathos of man tout court”
therefore constitutes in Origen every relation of one man to another: to suf-
fer or not to suffer, or to endure or not to endure (patior), that which the
other lives. Without necessarily designating some kind of alteration, which
is evidently not fitting for God, the word “passion” in Origen (passio) desig-
nates in this case “a sentiment or an affection”9—or to say it in Heideggerian
terms, a “fundamental affective tonality.”10 The question here is not simply,
to suffer or not to suffer, if we understand by pathos nothing more than the
original impression to which the other makes me subject. We must under-
stand the particular mode of suffering involved: “suffering nothing” (nihil
patitur)—which is of course not the same as suffering the nothing (nihil)—or
210 The Other
suffering that involves “visceral emotion” (mollintur viscera eius). For Origen
then, the originality of suffering precedes the modes of suffering. For man
as for God it is not a matter of not suffering (apatheia) as has been so often
decreed by theology hiding a latent Stoicism. Rather it is a matter of suffering
or passively enduring as God himself suffers or endures—in the same way
(following Saint Bonaventure above) that we can come to see as God sees,
understand as God understands, feel as God feels, and so on.
This entire matter concerns the possibility of an “apperceptive transposi-
tion” of oneself to the other. Does the other suffer “from me,” not in my place
since it is always mine alone, but rather in his “visceral emotion”? Or does
he always experience this suffering only in the mode of an alleged impassibil-
ity which is imagined to be dissolved by suffering all the more as it asserts
suffering’s unbearable presence by its very refusal of it? The hypothesis of a
communion of saints is suspended precisely here in this crucial alternative
between not partaking of suffering or a possible suffering of the other as I suf-
fer myself. If it is true that the other is not able to suffer in my place, but only
like me suffering or with me suffering, then nothing, neither man nor God,
will catch up with my inherent affects and my most profound lived experi-
ence. Thus the transfer of the passion of man to the passion of God put in
operation by the Alexandrian Father: “understand,” he says, “something sim-
ilar concerning the Savior [tale mihi quiddam intellige super Salvatorem].”11
Passion of God. Origen’s originality in the treatment of the question of the

other starting from the thematic of the communion of saints is not only, as
is often overemphasized (as in Moltmann or Varillon), found in his having
transposed the suffering of the Son into the passivity of the Father: “The
Father himself is not impassible” (ipse Pater non est impassibilis).12 For all
its just celebrity and originality, it must not be forgotten that in this for-
mula of Origen the “suffering of God” also precedes his passion. The divine
pathos is not merely the cause of his incarnation, but its origin—and even its
very being: “The Savior descended to the earth by pity for humankind. He
patiently endured our passions before [antequam] suffering the cross and
deigning to take on flesh. For if he did not suffer [si enim non fuisset passus],
he did not come to partake of human life.”13 Thus the “Incarnation not only
preceded the Passion, but in a certain sense the Passion preceded the Incarna-
tion!”14 Suffering in God—that which the Father shares with the Son on the
cross—ought not to obscure the original suffering of God: the unity of the
Father, Son, and Spirit in the pathos for man from before the foundation of
the world. Thus Levinas said: “Suffering—extreme passivity.”15 Such likely
constitutes the very being of God in his relation with the other: he is the
pathos of joy or the suffering of desolation.16 This perspective does not entail,
of course, that the divine being is altered in its essence and ceases to remain
God by falling into some kind of powerlessness, but rather that he takes on
himself our pathos in order to make of it his own passion: “God takes on our
manners of being [mores nostros supportat Deus],” insists Origen, “as the
Son of God takes on our passions [sicut portat passions nostras Filius Dei].”17
The “apperceptive transposition” of man to God—in his double assump-
tion of our manners of carnal being by the Son and our original affects by
the Father—reaches its height precisely here. As we will see in the following
chapter on Thomas Aquinas’s reflections on angelic alterity, even though I
am “here” (hic) and he is “there” (illic),18 God does not merely act as if (als
ob) he is with me in my “here,” but he even is made fit by his resurrection to
dwell there where I am, with me and not without me, in this that I suffer or
undergo at the heart of my most original affects. The horizontal significations
of the “here” of our earth (hic) and of the “there” of the Kingdom (illic) is
sometimes easily replaced by misleading theological categories that are too
vertical, namely of the “below” (as terrestrial world) and the “above” (as
the celestial world). The “overhanging transcendence [transcendance de sur-
plomb]” already finds its full term in Christianity, especially with Origen and
the original empathy of God. We will soon see that the resurrection of the Son
does not separate two worlds as two discordant entities, but unifies them in
the communion of saints, in the complementarity of two different visions of
the same world. The path that leads from God to man, but not from man to
God, permits the full realization of that which only remains programmatic in
Husserl: “The intrinsically first other (the first ‘not-Ego’) is the other Ego.”19
God who is always “other than myself” (ego alter) is uniquely revealed at the
same time as an “other myself” (alter ego) inasmuch as he espouses fully the
affects which are originally my own.
“What,” then, “is this passion [quae est ista passio],” asks Origen, “that
the Savior has suffered for us [quam pro nobis passus est]”—and which, we
could add, founds any possible communion of saints? Caritas est passio: “It
is the passion of charity.”20
Passion of Charity. To speak of “charity” (caritas) as a type of relation to

the other in God and as a passion (caritas est passio) is not to oppose it to
an action (actio) of which human desires would be the archetypes. On the
contrary, it constitutes the very being of God insofar as “passion” in him
(passio) is always immediately translated into “com-passion” (com-passio):
“Incapable of suffering [ô apathes], he suffers because of his love for men [ôs
philanthropos peponthen],” insists Origen in his Commentary on Matthew.21
God is indifferent to nothing in the life of man. Passion as “com-passion,”
ordinarily called “charity” (caritas), determines the meaning of the divine
pathos. Not only a possible mode of passibility, charity totally determines the
divine and constitutes its very being: Deus caritas est (1 Jn. 4:8).22 There is
passion in the divine because there is compassion and thus charity in him—
and not the inverse. The Father does not first suffer himself in an autarkic
self-contemplation. He suffers man in his Son, through whom he accepts
suffering and undergoes all that we suffer. The divine suffering (pathos)
212 The Other
comes from the passion of charity or compassion (passio caritatis)—which

is not the compassion of a passion still more original. In phenomenological
terms, the Father discovers the Son—and man in him—as an “intrinsically
first other” who constitutes his “other Ego.”23 For both God and man the
other (alter ego) is always already there at the heart of oneself (ego). One
does not leave oneself in order to find the other or encounter him. God thus
experiences what man experiences, not because he experiences everything in
his very being and is transformed in his essence, but because it belongs to his
divine decision to have “sympathy” with all that man undergoes: “And the
Father himself, God of the universe, full of indulgence, mercy and pity: is it
not true that he suffers in some way [nonne quodammodo patitur]? . . . The
Father himself is not impassable [ipse Pater non est impassibilis]. If we pray,
he has pity and compassion [miseretur et condolet]; he experiences a passion
of charity [patitur aliquid caritas] . . . , and takes on himself human passions
for us [et propter nos humanas sustinet passions].”24
The experience of God through man does not subsist therefore only at the
level of an intercorporeity with the Son by the exercise of the senses (spiri-
tual) converted in the crucible of faith (chap. 6: Bonaventure). It occurs also
at the heart of a foundational empathy with the Father by which God makes
the decision to experience and undergo all that humanity experiences and
undergoes and of sympathizing with all that humanity lives (chap. 7: Ori-
gen). “Intercorporeity with the Son” and “compassion of the Father” are thus
the two modes by which a communion of saints in the Holy Spirit becomes
possible, since, on the one hand, my Savior “still weeps over my sins” (luget
etiam nunc peccata mea) and “awaits our conversion” (expectat ut conver-
tamur), and, on the other hand, the saints themselves “await my taking part,
even me [et ego], in their wisdom.”25
Compassion
Bernard of Clairvaux, in his Commentary on the Song of Songs, directly
inherits from Origen’s Homilies on Ezekiel (and on Leviticus) this double
suspension of the Savior and of the saints themselves as constitutive com-
ponents of all alterity for the sake of engendering a true community (the
communion of saints). There is a long detour from one to the other, though
Origen will come to benefit a posteriori from Bernard. It is likely, as is well
known, that Origen’s Commentary on the Song was probably in Bernard’s
hands when he was laid up in the infirmary of Clairvaux (in 1124) with Wil-
liam of Saint-Thierry. His sickness did not stop him from commenting, at
William’s request, on the spiritual meaning of the Song of Songs. Thus Wil-
liam confesses in his Vita prima of Saint Bernard: “Being sick in our residence
I myself felt extremely tired and totally exhausted by the illness which had
so long affected me. On hearing this, Bernard sent me his brother Gerard,
of blessed memory, in order to urge me to come to Clairvaux, promising
me that, on my arrival, I would not tarry either to be healed or die . . . Two

sick men passed the time taking care of ourselves by exploring the spiritual
physics of the soul and the remedies of the virtues against the sickness of the
vices.”26 The passion of God in Origen (ipse Pater non est impassibilis) is
in Bernard made the compassion of God (Deus est impassibilis sed non est
incompassibilis). The second corrects the first and inoculates it against its
possible anthropomorphic tendencies.27
Deification and Transformation. The first warning of the Cistercian

abbot concerns this question of alterity when it attempts to constitute a
community—with the Lord, but also with the saints: we do not become one
with the other by forgetting our own personality. A hasty reading of the
fourth and last degree of the love of God in the De diligendo Deo could
lead to such a false view: “Man loves himself for the sake of God alone” (ne
seipsum diligat homo nisi propter Deum).28 The psychological and spiritual
realism first requires that we recognize that such an experience is not or
perhaps barely produced “in this mortal life” (in hac mortali vita) except in
“rare moments” (raro interdum) and perhaps “only once” (vel semel) and “in
passing” (raptim) in the “space of an instant” (unius vix momenti spatio).29
In other words, that which serves as the summit of love is likely not one of
the conquests realizable here below (in via). But the non-accessibility of the
experience in actuality does not prohibit us from describing it by right, at
least as a possibility.
The Cistercian quest, inherited from Origen, for the meaning of commu-
nity by means of the intersubjectivity of man and God seems to announce the
Eckhartian way that we studied above. “Loving the creature for God’s sake
alone” harkens back to “disappearing somehow as if one did not exist” (per-
dre tamquam qui non sis), to “no longer having any awareness of oneself” (et
omnino non sentire teipsum), and even to “being almost reduced to nothing”
(et paene annullari).30 Briefly, at least at first glance, there is no difference
between the exclusive love of God as “forsaking oneself” in Bernard develop-
ing Origen, and detachment as “quest for nothing” in Eckhart.31
The text cited imposes a nuance that definitively separates the Cistercian
élan and Rhineland nihilité on this question of alterity. Never does Bernard
require that his brothers exist no longer in their personalities, or to forget
themselves to the point of detachment from all, including themselves and
God. He recommends to them only that they act “somehow as if” (tamquam),
emphasizing that in this supreme state man will be “almost” (paene) reduced
to nothing and thus not totally dissolved into the divinity: “To eliminate from
oneself everything that prevents one from truly being oneself—such is not to
lose oneself but to rediscover oneself” (Étienne Gilson).32 The observation is
important, as I have already indicated, because it distinguishes Christianity
from any mysticism of “emptiness” (Buddhism, Zen, etc.), including certain
ambiguous formulas of Rhineland detachment that are falsely interpreted.
214 The Other
All anachronism aside, the warning of the abbot of Clairvaux rises up here
in an exemplary fashion and ought to be understood as not dissolving all
alterity in pure detachment from the self: the resurrection is not annihila-
tion but transformation.33 It is certainly true that the deification (deificari)
of man will resemble the “little drop of water poured into much wine,” but
only insofar as it “seems to be totally lost [deficere a se tota] by taking on its
taste and color.”34 What is expected in this fourth degree of love is not detach-
ment or the forgetting of the self in the sea of deity, but a metamorphosis or
transformation of the self in the Trinity. In the terms of alterity of the phenom-
enological tradition, the fourth degree of love does not come to be lost in a
kind of “affective fusion” in God (the Einsfühlung of Lipps), but rather enters
into a true “empathy” (the Einfühlung of Scheler) in which man remains him-
self by letting himself be transformed or by “becoming other [alia]” in God
and through God:35 “Of course, human nature will persist [manebit quidem
substantia],” says Bernard, “but under another form [sed in alia forma], in
another glory [alia gloria] and another power [alia potentia].”36
Such a “divine-human empathy,” with its surprising modernity at the heart
of an ancient discourse (the fourth degree of love), is fully realized in terms
of an “apperceptive transfer” of which Bernard of Clairvaux and William
of Saint-Thierry seemed to share the premises: “It will surely come to pass
one day that the work is conformed to [conformet] and accords with [con-
cordet] its author. It is therefore necessary that one day we will enter into
his sentiment [in eumdem nos affectum transire].”37 This is a remarkable
phrase worthy of elaboration. “Affective participation” as intentional mode
of empathy (“a directing of feeling toward the other’s joy or suffering”)38
finds here its most exemplary illustration in a “transfer of affects” (nos affec-
tum transire). Bernard reveals the lineaments of such in his De Diligendo
and Saint Paul the foundation in the hymn at the heart of his Letter to the
Philippians: hoc enim sentite in vobis, quod et in Christo Jesu, “Let that sense
[ressenti] be in you that is also in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 2:5). Stressed by Saint
Paul, then grounded in Origen and developed by Bernard, there occurs, if not
a transfer of properties between man and God, at least an affective transport
which ideally makes the experience of man the experience of God, the second
“making other” the first (in alia forma), though always maintaining it in its
original form (manebit quidem substantiam). The “conforming” (conforma-
tio) and “concord of hearts” (concordet) is accomplished only as a result of a
“transfer” (transire) by which the sentiments (affectus) that are in man (nos)
become progressively God’s own (in eumdem), in that he transforms them,
not to dissolve them but to purify them. Deification (deificari), for Bernard, is
not a dissolution of the human into the divine, but on the contrary an “affec-
tion” (affici) or even “liquefaction” (liquiscere) of the human affect—like the
“transfer of fluxes” in Husserl—flowing into the divine affect without being
suppressed or annihilated: “To be thus affected is to be deified [sic affici, deifi-
cari est] . . . It will thus necessarily be that in the saints all human attachment
is liquefied in an unspeakable fashion [ineffabili liquescere], and is completely

poured into the will of God [atque in Dei penitus transfundi voluntatem].”39
Compassionate God. “To be affected” (affici) is “to be deified” (deificari).

Does this mean that God himself is affected when we are transformed in him?
The question has some merit since a God without affect would be, at least
biblically speaking, contrary to his nature and condescension: “I have seen
the misery of my people” (Ex. 3:7). The imaginary dialogue of Bernard with
the possible “pathetic” derivatives of Eckhart is displaced for the sake of a
dialogue with Origen: ipse pater non est impassibilis—“the Father himself is
not impassable.” Though a direct dialogue with Origen’s Homilies on Ezekiel
is impossible to prove, Bernard seems in fact to correct Origen’s formula in
his Commentary on the Canticle.40 The funeral elegy (“Sermon 26”) given by
Bernard sometime after the death of Gerard, his brother in the flesh (1138)
is likely the most moving and beautiful of the Sermons on the Canticle: “The
one who is attached to God is ‘one spirit with him’ (1 Cor. 6:17). He is
transformed [mutatur], as it were, whole and entire [quemdam totus], in the
sentiments of God [in divinum affectum] . . . And though God is impassable
[porro impassibilis est Deus], he is not incapable of compassion [sed non
incompassibilis]. It is always fitting for him to have pity and to pardon.”41
It is certainly true that man is transformed by God (patitur) in a transfer
of affects (affectum transire), by which his deification is produced (deificari)
without dissolution (manebit quidem substantia). But it is not the same for
God. Positing such would risk the accusation of the anthropological reduc-
tion, submitting him to our proper affects and reducing him to our humanity.
Bernard takes care to emphasize, against Origen, the thesis of the divine
impassability according to the canon of medieval philosophy and theol-
ogy in general—hence avoiding the condemnation of theopaschism. God is
impassable—impassibilis est Deus—at least in the sense that he does not suf-
fer necessarily that which we suffer and as we suffer. Here at least it is right to
correct Origen. But such a conception of impassability does not prohibit a cer-
tain form of “compassibility” or “compassion”: non est incompassibilis—“he
is not incapable of compassion.” Briefly then, the thesis of the impassability
of God is not contrary to his “compassibility.” Having made this distinction
is certainly all to the Cistercian abbot’s merit. The impassability of the Father,
necessarily maintained because he is not man and does not suffer like us,
however requires in its place a form of “compassion” which renders him so
evidently close to man that one is no longer able to accuse him of some sort
of indifference to the spectacle of human misery.42
Let me mention the exemplary definition of God that Bernard gives in
the De Consideratione: non est affectus Deus, affectio est—“God is not
affected, he is affection.” God is “not affected” because the affect of man
(affectus) is almost always exterior or received from outside: we receive our
affects without choosing, nor deciding to undergo them. He is nevertheless
216 The Other
“affection” because the active love that he shows (affectio) is always interior
and intentional: he makes the choice of compassion to that which we suf-
fer.43 The rejection of affect in God (affectus) maintains his impassability, and
the necessity of his love or affection (affectio) makes possible his “compas-
sibility” or “compassion.” The God who is, in Bernard, “impassable but not
incapable of compassion” is a valid development of Origen’s “Father who is
not impassable.” Not that Bernard needs at all costs to maintain the impass-
ability of the Father, but Bernard realized that his passability ought not to
be identified with our human sensibility, though God is not unfeeling, theo-
logically speaking: “On the one hand, in order to deny the anthropomorphic
representation of a God submitted to his passions, it is necessary to recognize
the impassability of God. On the other hand, this impassability ought not to
be understood as insensitivity, for in God as well suffering is characteristic of
love” (E. Housset).44
Compassionate Man. The abbot of Clairvaux, in the context of this pathic

alterity (Origen) corrected by the active compassion of God, comes to welcome
this affection (affectio) and compassion of the divine (non est incompassibi-
lis). He admits himself to be justly affected (affectus) by the death of his
brother Gerard in the midst of his Sermons on the Canticle (“Sermon 26”).
The virtues of the compassionate God, precisely in the context of the commu-
nion of saints, are transferred and assigned to [affectée à] the compassionate
man, necessary for him also in order to constitute a new mode of commu-
nity. The songs of joy of the Canticle seem of little significance, for Bernard,
when sadness and grief strike: “What can this canticle say to me [quid mihi
et cantico huic],” he confides to his religious brothers, “who resides in the
depths of bitterness [qui in amertudine sum]?”45 Contradicting any suspicion
of a Bernardine flight into the intelligible, the abbot of Clairvaux reveals in a
new way how he lives and, through his own experience, inhabits for himself
the affectus that he has always proclaimed, in many other times and places,
as the “compassionate” seat of God himself. For it is not enough to speak
about experience, even in the most beautiful sermons (dicere); it is necessary
to traverse experience (ex-perire) in order to attain true wisdom (sapientia).
Bernard himself is not exempt from this: sometime after mourning for his
brother, there ceased the illusion of all mastery of the self in suffering (“I am
overcome”). He could no longer smother within his conscience that which
can only be expressed externally (“this needs to come out”): “I was able to
master the tears [on the day of the funeral] but not my sadness . . . [But now]
I confess I am overcome [fateor, victus sum]. Let that which I suffer within
come out [exeat]; it is necessary [foras quod intus patior]. Yes, let it be seen
by the eyes of my brothers, so that, knowing my sadness, they will judge my
laments with more indulgence and console me with more tenderness.”46
We see here with great force—as is always the case with great men, or at
least with great saints—that in the confession of weakness great power is
articulated. This is not merely a spiritual matter, but more basically it con-
cerns the human. One does not conquer his passions simply by taking control
of them, but rather by expressing them and offering them to another who is
capable of welcoming them (whether human brothers or God).47 In the midst
of the passion of torment the Christian speaks more—or at least otherwise.
Despite his tears, Bernard’s bitterness does not have the last word, as if he
were writing a Treatise on Despair. Rather, rooted in the conviction of the
communion of saints, Bernard pleads with his own dead brother who has
become himself also “impassable but not incapable of compassion” by virtue
of his union with the “Merciful God” (qui inhaeres misecordi). What is true
of God becomes true of man once he becomes fully held within God. The
“transport of sentiments” between man and God (through Jesus Christ; see
Phil. 2:5) is transposed into a “transfer of affects” between men—both of
whom are caught in God. Hence Bernard implores in via the compassion of
the deceased in patria. The divine-human empathy of an “impassable God
not without compassion” forms and transforms the human-human empathy
of those who are recognized to be “capable of compassion as well” through
him and in him. The properly human affection of the deceased Gerard (affec-
tus) is not in this sense “weak” for Bernard (imminutus), as if those held in
the divine glory are supposedly indifferent to human misery. It is on the con-
trary “metamorphosized” or “transformed” (immutatus), made capable of
giving in the beyond—through compassion (compassio) and love (affectio)—
what his passion (passio) or affection (affectus) is able to offer to affection
here below, unable to surrender itself without immediately suffering for it:
“You also must be merciful [esse misericordem], you who are united to the
Merciful [qui inhaeres misericordi] and henceforth delivered from misery.
You who are no longer able to suffer [qui non pateris], you are capable of
compassion [compateris tamen]. Your affection [affectus] is not diminished
[non est imminutus] but is transformed [sed immutatus].”48
With Bernard of Clairvaux, developing Origen, the “suffering with” of the
divine-human empathy seems perfectly accomplished. What had begun with
Origen (“The Father himself is not impassable”) is completed by Bernard
(“God is impassable but not incapable of compassion”). The basic charac-
teristic of the genesis of the other is not its dissolution into some kind of
annihilation or vacuity (a possible result of a bad reading of Eckhart), but
rather its individuated recognition in a community capable of welcoming it:
the communion of saints in the Word himself. At the end of this work we will
return to this specific path of alterity: only haecceitas will confer on the other
his true singularity, making of charity the proper name of all community, as
Christianity understands it (chap. 9: Duns Scotus). With Origen, therefore,
the path is not finished. For the “suffering with” of divine-human empathy
still waits to be constituted for all as a true communio sanctorum. Said other-
wise, the transfer of affects is not sufficient to make the communion because
the relation is not grounded in a certain carnal experience at the root of all
218 The Other
community, either human or divine. Rediscovering and even preceding the

experience of the conversion of the senses described by Saint Bonaventure,
Origen establishes the episode of the hemorrhaging woman in the Gospel of
Mark (5:25–34) as the source of a renewal of feeling [la sensation] at the very
heart of the communion (of saints). In a similar way as the reading of Martha
and Mary served as Eckhart’s framework for understanding the meaning [le
sense] of “detachment,” so also the passage about the hemorrhaging woman
serves as Origen’s support for expressing the virtue of the “carnal being with”
as the ultimate and privileged mode of community. From “common sense”
to “common world” a perfect complicity will be established between man
and God, so that between the divine and human there will no longer be,
as it were, two separated spheres, but rather an intercorporeity that will be
revealed to be capable of enduring, even in the beyond.
Being with: A Mode of Community
Common Sense
Once the Bernardian detour is accomplished—in order to correct Origen’s
pathos of the Father before him and Eckhart’s deification as dissolution after
him—we can return to the Alexandrian in order to accomplish properly the
leap from empathy to community. In passing from the Homilies on Ezekiel
(“suffering with” or divine-human empathy) to the Homilies on Leviticus
(“being with” as mode of community), Origen traverses the ford that marks
the boundary between pathos and the kinesthesia in which the passions
always remain enrooted: the hemorrhaging woman’s “approach [idcirco
accessit] signifies having truly understood [et quia vere intellexit] the holy
flesh [quae esset caro sancta sanctorum].”49
Understanding the Flesh. “To understand the flesh” (intellegere carnem)

and “to approach it” (accedere): such is, for Origen, what the hemorrhaging
woman accomplishes in a twofold sense: comprehension as grasping a phe-
nomenon and as the filling of an intention. Only an intentionality of the body,
as we have already discussed in regard to Bonaventure above though without
yet envisaging it in the context of a constitutive community of saints, simul-
taneously orients and innervates, as it were, the recognition of the woman
who touches the “flesh of Christ.” Instead of purely and simply requesting
salvation, the woman much more profoundly attempts incorporation into
the Son by touching his garment: “Through this contact full of faith [et fideli
tactu] she draws from the flesh [elicuit ex carne] a force that purifies her from
impurity and heals her of the evil that she suffered.”50
In this divine-human corps à corps, as a prefiguration of the communion
of saints (being incorporated into the Son), it is not sufficient for the woman
“to grasp” the body of Jesus just as one takes hold of an object in order to
appropriate it. The filling of the bodily intention is such that “touching the
flesh of Jesus” (tagat quis carnem Iesu) can only be understood “after the
manner described above” (quo supra exposimus): tota fide—“with complete
faith.”51 The “comprehension of the flesh” (intellegere carnem) is therefore
not, to speak in Husserl’s terms, a simple apprehension of a bodily substance
(Körperlichkeit). On the contrary, it gives and is given in the modality of
touch—for faith is the place of the conversion of the senses—which precisely
renders it carnal (Leiblichkeit): by her faith that saves her (“daughter, your
faith has saved you,” Mk. 5:34), the woman deciphered or recognized in the
flesh of the other (namely Jesus’s and the modes of being of his body) “the
same power to espouse the things that I have touched in my own” (Merleau-
P
onty).52 Said otherwise, since the Word of God dwells in his own flesh in the
same way that I experience my own flesh, I can and ought to understand that
only the “comportment of his flesh” suffices for me to render myself both
other and carnal: “Only a similarity connecting, within my primordial sphere,
that body over there with my body can serve as the motivational basis for
the ‘analogizing’ apprehension of that body as another animate organism.”53
Because the woman “approaches Jesus” in faith (accedat ad Iesum) by
realizing that she approaches “the Word made flesh” (tamquam ad Verbum
carnem factum), her “touching the flesh of sacrifice” reciprocally sanctifies
her as by a recoil: “touching the flesh of the sacrifice in order to be sancti-
fied” (Lev. 6:15).54 What saves this woman is therefore not her admission of
fault (“she told him everything,” Mk. 5:33)—for the communion of saints
is not satisfied by the sole ambition of salvation. It is rather her faith in the
flesh of the Word and her possible incorporation in him (“if I only touch the
hem of his garment . . . ,” Mk. 5:28). The “apperception by analogy” is such
here that what this woman experienced in herself of God (that power that
“came forth from the flesh of Jesus”—elicuit ex carne) made her recognize
the other—the incarnate Word—both as an “other me” (touching me as I can
touch him) and “an other than me” (I can never, in touching him, truly feel in
the same way that he feels when he touches me): “Who touched me?” (Mk.
5:30).55 The other of man (alter ego), the incarnate Word, is no less the other
than man (ego alter) since everyone recognizes both for him and the other
the irreducible opacity that separates him from all flesh—and even more so
for the flesh of God since he explicitly espouses the flesh of man all the while
veiling his divinity.
In Origen’s perspective the divine-human “touching-touched” is somehow
so present here that it becomes the principal— and probably original—
intentional aim in the communion of saints: that by which an intersubjectivity
is forged starting from a communion of intercorporeity. A few gradual steps,
from the simple “search for Jesus” to “contact with the Savior,” mark the car-
nal apprehension of the incarnate Word. Contrary to what typically passes
for a beatific “vision,” for Origen as much as for Bonaventure later (as also,
220 The Other
finally, in a completely different order in Merleau-Ponty), touching the lover

rather than seeing him, constitutes the highest degree of certitude that one has
been grasped by him: “We can explain in order and expound with convenient
distinctions the levels of progress (qui sit profectus) moving from the act of
touching the garment of Christ (Mt. 9:20; hemorrhaging woman), washing
his feet with tears and drying them with the hair on her head, and how it is
preferable to anoint his head with myrrh (Lk. 7:44–6; Mary of Bethany), and
finally of the superiority of resting on his breast (Jn. 13:24, 21:20; the disciple
whom Jesus loved).”56
Origen’s spiritual reading of an episode of scripture does not remain a
simple touching-touched event for a woman “enfleshed” via the incarnate
Word (Péguy),57 in a relation that we could no longer share: “Perhaps we
could also say that we also [et de nobis] have touched the holy flesh of the
Word of God and that we are sanctified.” What was for the hemorrhaging
woman both carnal and spiritual (by the intentionality of her body) remains
always accessible to us by means of the exercise of our own interior senses.
Such a sensory ascesis, already deciphered in the light of the conversion of
the senses in Bonaventure, becomes in Origen the condition of the experience
of a common mode shared by men and God within the sphere of the com-
munion of saints. Let us now investigate: (a) the manner in which man has
“sensed” God, and (b) the proper way that God “perceives” man, thereby
constituting their common intercorporeity.
Sense of Man and Sense of God. (a) It is fitting first to show how the believer,
in via during the terrestrial life, finds some ways to clear a path toward the
incarnate Word, thereby participating in those who form in patria his resur-
rected body (the communion of saints). Origen comments extensively on a
number of the “sacrifices of reparation” for which the Book of Leviticus states
that it is necessary to “pay back five times as much” when one errs by hold-
ing back some offering to God (Lev. 5:16). Because the number five “almost
always designates our five senses [pro quinque sensibus accipitur],” to sacri-
fice to God means to offer our bodily senses themselves in order to convert
them in the crucible of faith and thus to render them spiritual: “Thanks to the
senses of the interior man (interioris hominis sensus) who has become pure
of heart, we see God (Mt. 5:8); we have ears to understand Jesus’ teaching
(Mt. 11:15); we perceive this odor about which the Apostle speaks when he
says that we are the pleasing aroma of Christ (2 Cor. 2:15); we obtain this
taste about which the prophet says ‘taste and see the goodness of the Lord’
(Ps. 33:9); and we obtain this touching that John mentions when he speaks
of ‘what we have looked upon, and touched with our hands concerning the
Word of life’ (1 Jn. 1:1).”58
Like the “spiritual senses” in Bonaventure, the “interior senses” in Ori-
gen do not designate any other senses than the bodily ones, but these same
senses converted in the service of the apprehension of the Word as body of
the church. The restitution and sanctification of the senses—“we now restore
[restituamus nunc] these five senses to holy activities”—makes man newly
capable of espousing the modes of being of the Word: in the body of the
church, for now, as the place of his “flesh” and of the manifestation of the
“communion of saints.”
Seeing like him, hearing like him, feeling like him, tasting like him and
touching like him: we await these things in our sojourn on earth (in via),
which we will receive tomorrow in the Kingdom (in patria). Between those
in heaven and those on earth, the difference is not of nature but of degree.
The act of the resurrection is already fully realized from the morning of Eas-
ter—an event that the Parousia itself will only announce the full realization.
Origen’s famous doctrine of the “preexistence of souls”—the only idea of
Origen’s justly condemned as heresy—contradicts the premises of the com-
munion of saints in the carnal apprehension of God by the interior senses.59
The continuity between the beyond and the here-below requires the conser-
vation of that which properly constitutes the lived experience of Christian
faith as apprehension of the incarnate Word: a mode of flesh (Leib), not in
the sense of “body and spirit,” but as a “concrete emblem of a general manner
of being” by which what is lived in the body (Körper) is at the same time the
sign and symbol of the flesh that experiences it (Leib).60
(b) What is true of man (the hemorrhaging woman), for Origen, is also
true of God (in the form of the incarnate Word). The same thing goes, in
Against Celsus (I, 48), for Jesus himself, who “touching the leper” (Mt. 8:3)
is understood not only to deliver him from “physical leprosy by a sensible
touch” as comprehended by the crowd, but also to deliver him from “the
other leprosy by his truly divine touch.”61 For Christ, leprosy of the body is
only the physiological support of a more profound leprosy, which indicates
a mode of being of the flesh: the disgrace of a corporeity struck by sin (Gen.
3:7), in relation to which his flesh is incorporated to ours by his resurrection,
thereby effecting our deliverance. Far from pushing us to flee our bodies,
the Christian experience of the “conversion of the senses,” as Origen sees it
here, invites us to indwell them otherwise, namely, like Christ and in Christ.
Paradoxically touch is all the more divinized (in the spiritual senses) as it is
humanized (in the incarnation), always passing through the experience of the
Word made flesh.
Touching the Word who touches us, seeing him who sees us, feeling him
who feels us, and so on: such is precisely the meaning of intercorporeity, or the
divine-human “chiasm” through which we constitute a unity out of our senses.
Said otherwise, the “spiritual senses” appear—precisely for the first time with
Origen—as a properly Christian mode of their unification by the “common
sense”: “To all these actions of the interior senses, we add one, for the sake of
relating them all to a single God [ut ad unum Deum haec cuncta referamus].”62
This unity of the senses in the apprehension of the Word made flesh
announces the unity of those among the communion of saints who, by means
222 The Other
of senses converted in him, apprehend him in the same fashion whether “in
heaven” or “on the earth.” The beatific vision itself does not suppress the
senses in order to appear in the order of the soul alone. On the contrary, it
demands the whole and entire man who has converted his own senses in the
here below in order to consecrate them already as a lived experience of his
flesh in the beyond (Leib), and which survive somehow the decline of his
body here below (Körper). For the believer resurrection is not a Platonic sur-
vival of soul in eternity (psychê), but rather being “transformed” carnally (1
Cor. 15:51) in the encounter between oneself and the other in the lived expe-
rience of the flesh (Leib). What matters is the way that I live in the “body”
in order to constitute it as “flesh”: such is what is already hidden with the
Father in the anticipation of the final resurrection or the total incorporation
of carnal beings in the spiritual body of Christ or the church.63
Flesh of Scripture and Flesh of the Word. The Logos is not only “embodied
in Scripture” as Henri de Lubac investigated in his profound study of the
senses of scripture in Origen.64 He is also “incarnated in a body” according to
an original experience that only descriptive phenomenology can hope to elu-
cidate: “In the last days,” says Origen in the opening lines of his Homilies on
Leviticus, “the Word of God assumed a flesh drawn from Mary [ex Mariae
carne], thus making his entrance into this world. One thing was that which
was seen in him [aliud erat quod videbatur in eo], and another thing was that
which was understood [aliud quod intelligebatur], for the vision of the flesh
was offered to all, though only to a few was given the knowledge of the divin-
ity.”65 The act of “comprehending” the flesh of the Word (intellegere carnem)
by the “interior senses” (sensus interioris) is therefore not identified with the
exercise of intellection of the “senses of Scripture” (sensus scripturae). To say
therefore of the letter of scripture, that it is “like the flesh of the Word of God
and the skin covering his divinity” does not dispense us from placing all our
attention first on the flesh of the Word (descriptive phenomenology) and then
on the letter of the text (hermeneutics of scripture).66 The Alexandrian does
not negate the carnal experience of the Word made flesh in deciphering there
at the same time a spiritual apprehension—no more than he suppresses the
literal sense in traversing it completely.
Everything is a matter here of conversion (of the letter or the senses), and
not of an overcoming or a flight (outside the text or beyond the body). The
detour by way of the “common sense” of man and God requires that we no
longer separate the worlds, nor divide time, nor tear apart the flesh. The “in
common” of man and God constitutes their very being—as opposed to the
conception according to which their being in common, adding one to the
other, would then make their community. As far as Christianity is concerned,
one is either “with God—‘Emmanuel’ ” or one is not at all: “the community
of being—as opposed to a being of community—behold what it must now
be,” in phenomenology (Heidegger, Nancy) as much as in theology (Origen).67
The carnal community of man and God realized here below (the hemorrhag-
ing woman) expects in this sense to be conserved and metamorphosized in
the beyond: “Truly I say to you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until
the day that I drink it anew in the Kingdom of God” (Mk. 14:25). The exe-
getical commentary on the “new wine” develops the quasi-phenomenological
description of the hemorrhaging woman (still in the Homilies on Leviticus),
justifying this “community of being” that the Christian mode of intersub-
jectivity amplifies in the communio sanctorum rooted in the figure of the
resurrected Christ.
The Community of Being

Origen’s homilies on what will later be called the communion of saints in
“anticipation of new wine” (Lev. 10:9) constitute, as their French translator in
the celebrated Sources chrétiennes series would say, “les pages les plus émou-
vantes des Homélies sur le Lévitique.”68 Beyond the virtuosity of his prose,
the originality of the Alexandrian is found as much in the “precession,” as it
were, of the Father’s compassion over the single passion of the Son (“passion
in God”), as in the possible apperception of the Word by the spiritual senses
in the communion of saints (“the common sense”). Without falling into some
heterodoxy, the communio sanctorum, as an exemplary mode of community
in Origen, establishes the hypotheses of a potential solidarity of all men, both
on “earth” as in “heaven.” It is no longer enough to disunite the community
constituted by those who live in the heavenly homeland with the Father (in
patria), on the one hand, and those who, still in becoming, remain pilgrims
on the earth (in via), on the other hand. The path always matters more than
the results, and those who dwell “over there” (illic) are not indifferent to
anything that is done “down here” (hic). The intercorporeity of man and God
in God’s deliberately chosen compassion, on the one hand (Origen-Bernard),
and in the exercise of the spiritual senses, on the other (Origen-Bonaventure),
are united together in order simultaneously to constitute a “common time,”
a “common world,” and even a “common flesh” between God and men and
among men themselves.
A Common Time. Concerning time as a mode of community, it is not fitting,

according to Origen, to separate, on the one hand, a terrestrial temporality
that we know and within which we are the sole actors, and, on the other
hand, a celestial eternity in which the blessed rejoice in their well-being in a
unilaterally a-temporal world. For both the phenomenologist (Husserl) and
the theologian (Origen) there is no recognition of the other than by means
of the constitution of a “common time”: “Private time,” says Paul Ricoeur
regarding the father of phenomenology, “is ordered by relation to an objec-
tive common time of which it is a mode of appearing.”69 Said otherwise, and
returning to the question of the communion of the living on earth and in
224 The Other
heaven in Christ (communio sanctorum), the temporality of the blessed is

neither able nor ought negatively to take position against those humans on
earthly pilgrimage. Without both the celestial and terrestrial, no intersub-
jective relation is possible. That “my Savior even now [etiam nunc] weeps
over my sins” in “anticipation of the new wine” (Lev. 10:9) signifies that the
terrestrial temporality is not indifferent at all to the fulfillment of celestial
temporality.70 The first is not opposed to the second, no more than the second
is necessarily a more enviable mode. Either of them and both together—as
two divergent but complementary perspectives on the vision of God—are
ordered to each other in order to constitute together a single and unified
“incarnate temporality” in the common knowledge of the Eternal One him-
self: “Eternal life is to know you the one true God and the one you have sent,
Jesus Christ” (Jn. 17:3).
The Pascalian formula of a “Jesus in agony until the end of the world” thus
indicates, and retrospectively in Origen, less the act of agony itself in some
kind of Dolorism that is resolutely absent from his theological perspective
than the dimension of expectation [l’attente] by which the Word constitutes
a “common texture” (Merleau-Ponty) of man and God and among men by
means of his own Body, the church.71 Far from attributing merely a carnal
suffering to the divinized Christ in his own body, “it appears more likely,”
says Henri de Lubac, “that throughout this homily [of Origen’s] we have to
do with Christ contemplated not as he is in himself alone but as mystically
united to man.”72 The Son’s act of waiting [attente] for our own conversion is
repeated by an “expectation of the saints” [attente des saints] which already
constitutes his body. Perfection, for Christianity, is not realized in some philo-
sophical eternal immutability, but rather in the progressive constitution of
a “common temporality” among men in the single apperception (spiritual)
of the Word made flesh: “In their departure from here below, the saints no
longer obtain immediately the full recompense of their merits. They wait for
us [sed expectant etiam nos] while we delay and drag on. There is not for
them some perfect joy within which they are not afflicted by our erring [pro
erroribus nostris dolent] and do not weep over our sins [et lugent nostra
peccata].”73
The “passion of charity” that God has for men is transformed into com-
passion among men if it is the case that humans now live and experience
themselves and others totally in God. Auto-affection and hetero-affection are
reciprocally engaged with one another in order to constitute the communion
of saints and a renewed mode of alterity. Because Christ “does not want to be
alone [non vult solus] in the Kingdom to drink the wine, he waits for us [nos
expectat].” And because the saints do not want to “proceed on to perfection
without us [sine nobis],” they wait for us also.74 In this shared expecta-
tion, both of God for men and among men in God, solipsism (solus ipse) is
definitively shattered. The Son’s not wanting to be alone means not only, in
soteriological perspective, never to break his communion with the Father as
at Gethsemane, but it is even more, in eschatological perspective, never to

be unloosed of his relation to man until the end of time: “It is enough for
a Christian [christianos] to be brought to trial,” insists Origen in the Greek
version of his Homilies on Jeremiah, “in order that the Christ [o Christos] be
brought to trial.”75 Each sin of man “crucifies anew” the very One who died
on the cross once and for all.76 There is discovered in this pathos of the divine
flesh the pathos of all the saints, by which we are introduced, in virtue of this
“common time,” to a “common world” between man and God.
A Common World. “The communio sanctorum,” says Karl Barth, “can be

achieved only in the distinctive triangle of God, a man and a fellow-man—the
two latter being united in a definitely ordered relationship.”77 Nothing in fact
is more foreign to Christianity than every form of spiritualism that pretends to
justify some kind of direct communication with the dead, or with those who
are with God. For both theology and phenomenology there is only a “com-
mon world” by means of an “enactment of community” (Vergemeinschaft)
by which both are recognized to pertain identically to the same world.78 Said
otherwise, that is, in the perspective of the communion of saints, the koi-
nonia formed by the collection of saints on earth as in heaven does not live
first by way of an already constituted community, but only from the shared
intentional aim of one and the same God: what matters for Husserl—as
well as Origen—is not what they say “about community” but how the one
and the other advance step by step “toward community.”79 For genetic phe-
nomenology and Christian eschatology, egoity is not the root of community
(Vergemeinschaft or koinonia) but rather stems from and is constituted by it:
“We are the body of Christ [corpus sumus Christi] and his members in every
part [et membra ex parte],” says Origen commenting on 1 Cor. 12:27.80 The
“part of the body of Christ” that we are only becomes complete to the degree
that not our spirit alone but our body whole and entire comes along with the
spirit to submit to God: “If I come to force my flesh and all my members to
be in agreement with the spirit [in consonantiam spiritus trahere], then I will
become perfectly submitted [tunc perfecte videbor esse subiectus].”81
The “community of the world,” that is, among men in the incarnate Word
therefore comes first from the capacity of each man “totally” (ex integro) to
submit his own body to the body of Christ, the church. It is meaningless to
point out the absence from the body (Körper) of those who are in heaven
in order to prohibit intersubjectivity since it is founded on the lone modes
of being common to the flesh (Leib). What perishes in death is the bodily
senses only insofar as they remain “unsubmitted” to their spiritual conver-
sion. To be resurrected with Christ and to commune with those who already
constitute his body does not negate either my own flesh or theirs. On the con-
trary, it is only a matter of attempting to convert, in the unity of a “common
world” (the incarnate Word), my bodily senses so that they finally become
“spiritual” along with those who are already in heaven and contemplate God
226 The Other
with their interior senses. In such a conversion of corporeity both mystical

and intersubjective, perhaps I then come to sense how one senses God along
with those who in the Son are with the Father; to understand how he must be
heard; to see how he must be seen; and so on. The communion of saints does
not make appeal to some “repayment,” as is sometimes believed, as if God is
engaged in a sort of ghastly bargaining as unworthy of the hope of men as
it is of the grace of God. Likewise it does not seek to live a “mutual union”
or an illusory “fusion” of the living and dead that a deceptive etymology
lends to thought (cum-unio). Only the mystery of “participation” or “shared
support” (com-munis) of the life of one by another in Christ accounts for
it:82 “My essential position consists in being able to respond to this essential
misery of the other and finding resources to do so. The Other who dominates
me in his transcendence is thus the stranger, the widow and orphan toward
whom I am obligated.”83
In the Christian conception of the communion of saints, however, the
responsibility of the one for the other is not played out in the asymmetry of
their direct encounter. This is its difference with the direct relation of Levinas
and Judaism (“Am I my brother’s keeper?” Gn. 4:9). Because the Word is
incarnated just as I am in my flesh, Christ “stands between me and my neigh-
bor.”84 For the Levinasian verticality of the face-to-face encounter [face-à-face]
there is substituted the (Merleau-Pontian) corps-à-corps.85 From the perspec-
tive of the end of time, that is, of the Parousia, this “common world” ever in
genesis, in the progressive submission of my own body to the body of Christ
(and to those who are held within it), finds its full realization in the goal of the
church as “common flesh” in which “all will be in all” (1 Cor. 15:28).
A Common Flesh. By virtue of the possible “empathy” of God to man and

the necessary “carnal apprehension” of the Resurrected that still shows its
value for thought today, the Son himself awaits [attend] in his flesh (Leib) of
which we are the members, the time to submit finally to the Father the entire
creation still in process of being accomplished: “When the Son will have
achieved his work and led all his creation to the supreme perfection, then he
will submit himself [ipse dicitur subiectus] in those he has submitted to the
Father.”86 What was often heretically interpreted here as the disobedience of
the Son to the Father in the anticipation [l’attente] of the total “remunera-
tion” or ”reconciliation” of all things in him (apocatastasis) actually leads to
the hypothesis of a real and effective communion of saints to its term: “When
all things will have been submitted to him,” says Saint Paul, “then the Son
himself will submit [upotagêstai] to the One who has submitted all things to
him, in order that God will be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28).87 It is not the Son
himself who is disobedient before the final submission, but only the creation,
which, in the Son, accomplishes the act of submission and being brought to
be with the Father—in the threefold sense of “remission,” “remuneration,”
and “recapitulation.”88 The flesh of the Son somehow carries the stigmata,
not by some original incompleteness of his own body (by which he would
then definitively leave the sphere of the divine), but of an incompleteness
which is that of creation and of man himself whose gaze is still turned away
from God because of sin: “What is lacking in the afflictions of Christ I fill up
in my flesh [sarxi mou] for the sake of his body [sômatos autou] which is the
Church [ekklesia]” (Col. 1:24). The “inhabitation” of the Son in the body of
the church therefore expresses, even today, the lived experience of his own
flesh in ours. His body, at once resurrected (in himself) and still on the way
toward resurrection (in his link with the creation) is of such a kind that he
awaits the incorporation of all humanity into his church and, through it, the
realization of the “interpenetration” of all men among themselves: “The Sav-
ior does not want to receive his perfected glory without you [sine te], that is,
without his people who are his body and his members. For he wants to dwell
as the soul [sui ipse velut anima habitare] of this body of his Church in these
members of his people . . . so that truly will be accomplished the word of the
prophet: ‘I will dwell among them and walk with them’ ” (Lev. 26:12).89 In
the intercorporeity that here creates the specific situation of alterity at the
heart of the communion of saints, the unity of the flesh of man and of the
flesh of God in the resurrected Christ is therefore not, in the last instance, a
unity of fusion, but only of interpenetration, even of “coupling” or “combin-
ing” (Parung), to use the terminology of Husserl.90 The “carnal similitude” of
man and God do not suppress that which is proper to the flesh of God or to
the flesh of man: a vivification and indwelling of the members of his body for
the flesh of God and, for the flesh of man, a welcoming of such an inhabita-
tion for the sake of participating in the complete submission of the creation
to the sole resurrected flesh of the Son of man.
If there is in Origen a hermeneutic of the text (de Lubac’s senses of
scripture), it is founded on a phenomenological description of the body in
general—the original empathy of God in the pathos of the Father and the
pathos of the Son, the experience of intercorporeity in the conversion of the
senses and the genesis of communion in the temporal, worldly, and carnal
community. “The pure—and so to speak, still dumb—psychological experi-
ence, which now must utter its own sense with no adulteration” thus finds
in the Alexandrian its greatest raison d’être.91 The entire creation does not
speak but by means of the body, and remains in the expectation of the carnal
praise of all the saints, themselves unified in the resurrected Christ and built
up in him, by, as it were, a living “ossificiation,” the body of the church. The
“community” of saints gives rise to thought here as the exemplary relation of
“intersubjectivity” in Origen, not, in the first place however, as it is articulated
in acts of praise, but rather as it is made by the movements of the flesh which
“speak” themselves. The other creates me as the flesh speaks me and thus
establishes the engendering egoity (Eckhart) as an engendered community
(Origen): “All of these bones speak [omnia ossa ista loquuntur],” exclaims
the Alexandrian at the end of his Homilies on Leviticus, “they sing a hymn
228 The Other
[hymnum dicunt] and give thanks to God [et gratias agunt Deo] . . . Each
bone among these bones was feeble, broken by the hand of a strong man.
It had neither the joint of charity [non habebat iuncturam caritatis], nor the
nerves of patience [nos nervos patientiae], nor the veins of the vivifying spirit
[non venas vitalis animi] and the vigor of faith [et fidei vigorem]. But when
the One came who was to collect [colligeret] that which was dispersed, and
to unite [coniungeret] that which was disjointed, linking bones and joints, he
began to construct [aedificare coepit] the holy body of the Church [sanctum
corpus Ecclesiae].”92
What is produced for man in his relation to God—community as mode

of intersubjectivity—has not yet received its full justification with Origen,
according to a structure of alterity fully identified. Said otherwise, it is not
sufficient for the living or the deceased to be imagined in an incorporated
whole, even if in the incarnate Word. It is necessary instead to show that
living for each with the other and in God signifies further that one is not
only with the other in a third, but one receives oneself from this Third who
exceeds and totally overflows us all. After the homiletic detour by way of
Origen concerning the communion of saints, there comes the Thomist way
concerned with the question of the angels (Summa theologiae Ia. Q. 50–64).
We never simply descend from heaven with Aquinas (the angels) in the sense
that for the medievals heaven is never as “pure” as when it offers for us a
structure of alterity that the “separated philosophy” cannot deliver. Corre-
sponding to the phenomenological question posed at the beginning of the
Cartesian Meditations (how is a man able to know another man, or “what
about the other ego?”)93 is the answer given by the treatise on the angels of
Saint Thomas’s Summa: “Do angels know each other? [utrum unus angelus
alium cognoscat]” (Summa, 1a, q. 56, a. 2). Of course, the rapprochement of
angels and alterity would appear absurd if (a) Husserl himself had not sug-
gested it, and if (b) so many Treatises on the Angels of the Middle Ages had
not furnished precisely its highest degree of conceptuality.
(a) Just a passing note, then, on the “Prolegomena” to the Logical Inves-
tigations (1901), which ought to be sufficiently convincing: “Mathematical
angels may no doubt use other methods of calculus than ours—does this
mean that they may have different axioms and theorems?” Husserl’s point
is clear and seems to be confirmed later in Ideas I (1913). If the angels and
even God could adopt other methods in order to know what we know, it
would still be necessary that they take the same perspectives on the world
that we also have: “It is proven true that everything that has the character of
a spatial object is able to be perceived not only by men but even by God . . .
as far as modes of appearances are concerned.” Briefly, for angels, men, and
God, a certain community is at least possible, even if in a purely fictive and
non-confessional mode.94
(b) Concerning the Middle Ages: it is wrong to accuse medieval philoso-

phy of not having “thematized” the question of alterity as such, at least as
Thomas Aquinas (chap. 8) and Duns Scotus (chap. 9) are concerned. With the
treatise on the angels of the Summa (1a, qq. 50–64), a reflection on a clearly
differentiated alterity is undertaken, though Thomists have rarely indicated
its striking pertinence for current discussions—though let an exception be
made for the “language of the angels according to the Scholastics.”95 We will
come to this in due course.
After seeing the other in the sphere of “community” (Origen) and before
circumscribing him in his “singularity” (Scotus) it will be necessary to reveal
him as such in his “constituted egoity”—a task loaded on the back of Aqui-
nas. At the heart of the most confessional thought (the angels) is articulated
something radically phenomenological (the structure of relation to the other).
Of course, it is not necessary to believe in the existence of angels in order to
think within their horizon. For in this case their existence matters even less
than their appearance or mode of phenomenalization. We find in this new
model of alterity given by angelology the roots for a newly constituted egoity
(alterology). To say it differently, the treatise on the angels of Saint Thomas
reread together with the Cartesian Meditations (especially the fifth) seems
to build anew the entire phenomenological structure of alterity. We can at
least recognize that this structure, if not fully based on God himself, has
been researched so thoroughly in the twentieth century (e.g., by the Cartesian
Meditations) but did not remain unthought until then (e.g., in the Summa
Theologiae), albeit in a theological rather than phenomenological context
and with a completely different goal in mind, one that was soteriological
rather than gnoseological.
Chapter 8
Angelic Alterity (Thomas Aquinas)
With the treatise on the angels in the Summa of Thomas Aquinas (Ia, qq.
50–64) alterity is truly constituted, though now identified with a shared
structure of “knowledge” and not merely affectivity (as in Origen). When
an angel comes to “know [cognoscit] another angel” (q. 56, a. 2) an ego
discovers an alter ego. The sky of theology serves in a new way as a model
for the renewal of the earth of philosophy: angelic alterity for the sake of
the formation of intersubjectivity (Thomas Aquinas), after the communion
of saints for the sake of the genesis of community (Origen) but before the
charitable union conceived as an invitation to singularity (Duns Scotus). In
each case, as always, it is a matter of the same undertaking: we are capable
of receiving ancient models in order to make fruitful the most advanced con-
temporary research. For we would certainly believe wrongly that we have
discovered new frontiers on our own when our ancient predecessors have
already done much of the imaginative work well before us. We will therefore
not be offended to find, at the heart of theological reflection on the angels, philosophical
constitution of the
a bold starting point from which to think the philosophical constitution of other and Aquinas's
reflection on angels
the other. For Aquinas what differentiates men from angels is not only the
difference by species proper to the angelic nature, but also the substantial
union with a body by which they are differentiated from men: “Not being
composed of matter and form, but being composed of subsistent forms, the
non-corporeal substances ought to be distinguished by species [in specie] . . .
And the very fact that the soul of man has need of a body in some fashion
in order to act shows that it is an intellectual nature at an inferior degree to
that of the angel, which is never united to a body [qui corpori non unitur].”1
From this we could certainly conclude that the angels no longer have any-
thing to say to us today. Their “disincarnation” would be the condition for
their demythologization (I will return to this shortly) and even for their eradi-
cation from our reflection. Yet Thomas adds, surprisingly, that the angels
take on a corporeity in order to appear. If they “are” not a body, they must
still “assume” one: “It is not for themselves [propter seipsos] that the angels
need to assume bodies [indigent corpore assumpto] but for us [sed propter
nos].”2 Not “being” bodies, the angels “have” or “assume” them, at least in
231
232 The Other
their manner of appearing to man. Far from suppressing corporeity (part II)
and especially the fundamental hypothesis of a possible conversion of the
senses (chaps. 6 and 7), the carnal appearance of angels, on the contrary,
confirms it (chap. 8). Christianity is forever and always the declension of
a carnal mystery, which evidently includes the apparently most non-carnal
beings themselves: the angels. The paradox is sound because the exception
proves the rule, as in the Book of Tobit: “the angel which appeared to Tobit
[apparuit Tobiae] was seen by all [ab omnibus videbatur].”3
What is appropriate to “angelic” knowledge (Thomas Aquinas), as for
“saintly” communion (Origen) does not involve remaining in the heaven of
its intellections, nor of being satisfied in a contemplation indifferent to every-
thing human. On the contrary, the angel comes to man and is very precisely
sent to him as a “messenger” (angelos), not for the sake of being incarnate—
the difference between the angel and the Word made flesh is essential (contra,
once again, the Gnostic Christos angelos thesis)—but primarily in order to
protect him, even to take care of him or contemplate him: “Every man in the
pilgrim state receives the protection of an angel [custos angelos disputatur].”4
In this angelic custody or guardianship of man (just as a cleric carefully keeps
the host in a pyx [dans la “custode”] in order to protect it) there is articulated
inchoately at least a fully constituted alterity discovered by medieval phi-
losophy in its treatment of the nature of the angels. The reasons for rooting
alterity at the heart of reflection on the angels are not carried in this direction
in the absence of the corporeity of the superior creatures, nor even in the
purity of their actions which restrains them from sin. Such motifs move them
away from us so much that they can do nothing for us in their radical strange-
ness. Only the identified concern that each angel takes in regard to the other,
as well as for each man in particular, indicates also the care for the other that
is found in contemporary research on alterity: “The fact of not evading the
burden imposed by the suffering of others defines ipseity itself” (Levinas).5
Should the angel Damiel in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire regret the
fact of not being incarnate? Can he? Posing the question of the constitu-
tion of alterity in relation to the angels while reading Thomas Aquinas does
not allow us to accept such a conclusion. On the contrary, the actions and
gestures of the human world cannot remain without interest for those who
live in the divine world. There are not—neither for them nor for us—two
worlds, as our investigation of Origen already made plain. There are instead
two different manners of living in the same world. Even if observed through
the insurmountable transparency of a car window, the little things that fill
our daily experience are not foreign to the angels who serve as guardians of
humanity, if also in a different mode altogether than our own (apparent, not
substantial flesh) and with a completely different purpose (the invocation of
the message of God rather than the incarnation in humanity). What remains
buried within the order of nostalgia for Wim Wenders is in Thomas Aquinas
already realized in hope and specifically related to a newly constituted alterity.
Angelic Alterity 233
Everything is shared between the angel and man, as I will now show, including
the experiences of a “passer-by who, under the rain, shut her umbrella with a
twitch of the hand and was left drenched . . . ; a schoolboy who described to
his astonished teacher how a fern emerges from the earth . . . ; a blind woman
fumbling around for her watch as she felt my presence.”6
Return of the Angels

According to a classical theologoumenon, the angel always falls by way
of envy (peccatium invidiae) or pride (peccatum superbiae). According to
Thomas Aquinas, the fallen angel sins by way of envy when he competes,
not only with the divine glory (sin of pride), but also with a glory falsely
believed to be complete in itself and given to men (sin of envy): “After the sin
of pride, the angel experiences the sin of envy because he is saddened by the
good of men.”7 Envy is not lacking in Wim Wenders’s angel Damiel, whose
volatile wings of Desire make him such a fickle personality. The antinomy
between angelic spirituality and human corporeality leads him always to seek
to retain the benefits of one all the while enjoying the privilege of the other.
Thus Damiel reflects: “The wonder of a living spirit is to witness, day after
day, for eternity, the spiritual, nothing but the spiritual in people—but some-
times I tire of my eternal spiritual existence. I wish I no longer hovered over
everything eternally, I would like to feel in myself a weight that abolishes the
limitless and drags me down to earth.”8 But does the angel here suffer from
an “unendurable perfection” or “density that crushes it” as Rilke says in the
Duino Elegies?9
Paradoxically, though as an understandable aftereffect, at the very moment
of the celebrated return of the angels on the cultural and cinematic scene—with
Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Wenders’s Wings of Desire and Faraway, So Close!,
or Michel Serres’s La légende des anges—the cohort of seraphim, cherubim,
and other spiritual creatures seems to escape the clutches of Western theol-
ogy. Protestant theologian Rudolph Bultmann, in his work to demythologize
theology, did not hesitate to hold responsible the New Testament’s belief
in spirits for “making the message of the Christian faith incomprehensible
for our time” (1955: the era of the “electric lightbulb,” “photography,” and
“modern medicine”).10 Likewise Catholic theologian Christian Ducoq sug-
gested that the biblical data on maleficent spirits was “relevant as an image
of the world that provided the context of revelation, but is not guaranteed by
it.”11 Is it that both the rapid development of modern technology and (worse
yet) the revelation of the Word made flesh together should have extinguished
all belief in angelic realities? This decline of angelology in Western theology
was not lost on Henri Corbin who, precisely as a philosopher, placed it in the
spotlight, but rediscovered it in a new place: Islam. He specifically blamed the
doctrine of the two natures (homoousios) that develops across Christianity
234 The Other
from Saint Paul to the Councils of the Fathers, in order to uncover behind
it a supposedly primitive sense of Christianity as a “prophetology,” thereby
retrieving from the beginning an angelology starting from Islam.12 The angels
therefore no longer have citizenship within the Western church at least his-
torically defined as such, ad intra by the contestations of contemporary
theologians (Catholic and Protestant) and ad extra by the denial of a true
Christian angelology by recourse to Islam. Our concern here is not reopen-
ing some polemic on the subject of the angels. Perhaps, anyway, they already
have enough to worry about in their role as messengers (angelos) between
God and men, which is more or less uniformly recognized in virtually every
tradition. Yet the specific displacement of angelology put in operation by
Henri Corbin, from theology (whether Christian or otherwise) to philosophy
(starting from phenomenology in particular), authorizes a new philosophical
interrogation that concerns the legitimacy of such a return of angelology.
In Light of the Cartesian Meditations

From the vantage of such a rapprochement between phenomenology and
theology—the fecundity of which will only be measured a posteriori and not
a priori—we will attempt to decode the treatise on the angels in Thomas’s
Summa (Ia., qq. 50–64) in light of the fifth Cartesian Meditation of Husserl.
By a sort of automatic recoil, I will also be forced to show how in Husserl
himself there is found a nostalgia for angelic knowledge, away from which
much recent phenomenology has made it its task to swerve.
We will take then the fifth of the Cartesian Meditations as a guide for
understanding Thomist angelology: on the one hand, as a guiding thread to
be sure (we will therefore follow it step by step in the course of this confron-
tation), but also, on the other hand, as the boundary zone of our investigation
(we will have to mark the boundary lines at each step in order not to fall into
gross anachronism or an arbitrary comparison). Paradoxically, in guise of a
beginning, the quaestio on the self-knowledge of the angels of the Summa
begins in a strangely similar way as the fifth Cartesian Meditation opens:
Thomas asks, “Does the angel know itself? (q. 56, a. 1),” and Husserl won-
ders what happens “when I reduce myself by the phenomenological epochê
to my absolute transcendental ego” (§42).
The Broken Circle
Angelic Solipsism
Angelic Self-Knowledge. Descartes himself— along with Husserl as his
inheritor and even Descartes’s own objectors—acknowledged the connection
between angelic knowledge and the innate ideas that emerge in the experience
of the cogito. Such is the meaning of Burman’s retort to Descartes in 1648:

“Concerning the idea of the angel, it is certain that we form it starting from
the idea of our mind and that we only have knowledge of it from the starting
point of our own mind; even if angels do not exist at all, we can think about
them only by observing ourselves.”13 Instead of following Burman here and
responding directly to this objection, Descartes cuts short the interview and,
blaming the clumsiness (ineptus) of the Angelic Doctor on this question of
the angels, instead justifies their apparition from scripture alone: “It is prefer-
able to follow Scripture on this point and confess that the angels were young
men, that they appeared as such and as similar things.”14 Just the voluntary
interruption of the interview by Descartes is enough to condemn any thesis of
a common measure between Thomist angelology and Cartesian egology. But
this would be based on a mistaken conception, as Jean-Luc Marion has said,
of Descartes’s “théologie blanche.”
As the Angelic Doctor himself will soon show us, not only does Descartes
substitute a phenomenology of the angels for any substantialization of their
corporeity (“the angels were young men and appeared as such”), but even
their cogito is nothing other already in Thomas Aquinas than the act of angelic
self-knowledge. Such a move is essentially repeated by Husserl. The opera-
tion of methodological doubt aside: the angel is already reduced in advance.
In fact, according to Saint Thomas, the angel always already knows itself
by virtue of the proper and specific immanence of its mode of knowledge.
Whereas in the transitive action of human knowledge the intellect “transi-
tions” or passes from the knowing subject to the object known (“the object
or matter on which the action is exercised is separated from the agent”), in
the imminent action of the angelic intellect the object itself is seen directly
and immediately united to the one who knows (“in order for the action to be
produced, in the immanent action it is necessary for the object to be united
to the agent”).15 Because that which is to be known (the intelligible forms) is
identically and in act that which is known (the angel as subsistent intelligible
form), the angel comes to an immediate and pure experience of itself. Man
on the contrary, always only in potency relative to that which ought to be
known and having access to it only by virtue of a composition of matter and
form, knows himself (at least in statu viae) in a mediated fashion, starting
from a process of knowing founded on the apprehension of the sensible.
Morning and Evening Knowledge. Where does this pure egological experi-
ence come from that the angel alone has of itself? Here we find the distinction
in the angelic intellect between “morning knowledge” (cognitio matutina)
and “evening knowledge” (cognitio vespertina). Morning knowledge, says
Thomas citing Augustine, gives access to “the primordial being of things [cog-
nitio autem ipsius primordialis esse rerum], knowledge pertaining to things as
they are in the Word [secundum quod res sunt in Verbo],” such that evening
knowledge, by contrast, is “the knowledge of created being as existing in its
236 The Other
own nature [cognitio autem ipsius esse rei creatae secundum quod in propria
natura consistit].”16 And when the angel knows things in their own nature
(evening knowledge)—in other words according to a natural, as opposed
to supernatural, knowledge—he knows them, says Saint Thomas, either by
means of the “reasons of things” (rationes rerum) which are in the Word, or
by the “innate species” (species innatus) that he sees in the things but without
drawing it out of them.17 According to this latter mode of knowledge (of
things by their innate species) the angel will know itself in perfect totality.
Since the angel is pure form, for Thomas, to the exclusion of all matter, each
angel is itself its own unique species or form, so that between angels there
is no difference but that of species: “The angels are not composed of matter
and form; there are no two angels therefore of the same species.”18 There are
so many species of angels as there are angels. When the angel knows itself it
knows perfectly and entirely the species that he is in himself, and as a crea-
ture starting from his own created nature.
In this difficult debate on the modes of angelic knowledge, Thomas has
maintained a remarkable consistency regarding “evening knowledge” as
natural knowledge by the selfhood of things and of oneself, outside of all
supernatural illumination: in this act of knowledge, the angel apprehends
things and himself starting from the ideas that the Word has impressed in
him, but without direct relation to them. We will find by virtue of a surpris-
ingly smooth transposition from the angelic intellect to the human intellect
the Cartesian theory of “innate ideas” as “first seeds of truths that nature has
deposited in the human spirit” and that the second meditation will leave at
least implicitly to be worked out in the experience of the cogito.19 From the
immanence of the angelic intellect to itself in Thomas to the immanence of the
cogito in Descartes, there is only a small step to be taken (every reserve aside
about the act of suspension performed by the subject on itself). A trace of a
pure idealism in Aquinas will therefore paradoxically be found in this mode
of angelic knowledge. The angel in Thomas’s reflection thus strangely opens
a certain pre-Cartesian access to a pure egological experience, by means of a
nature prohibited to man who is always submitted—at least during his terres-
trial sojourn—to the mediation of the sensible. Separating such an experience
of the cogito in Husserl and Descartes from the angelic knowledge in Thomas
suffices already to crystallize the ideal of the transparency of consciousness to
itself perpetuated through Husserlian phenomenology.20
The Source of the Ego. Even so, such a Cartesian- Thomist convergence
does not suffice to bring to light the originality of the Husserlian enterprise,
both the constitution of the ego starting from itself as source and horizon
of an unsurpassable finitude, as well as the question of the exit from solip-
sism. Concerning the constitution of the ego: here does the boundary and
guiding thread of a reading of Thomist angelology in light of the Cartesian
Meditations come to light insomuch as, paradoxically, a greater proximity
is simultaneously deciphered between the Thomist angelic ego and the Car-
tesian ego, on the one hand, and the Cartesian and Husserlian egos, on the
other. In fact, whereas the innate ideas or species innatus arise for Thomas
evidently from the Word—and Descartes does not deny at all this supernatu-
ral origin either—for Husserl on the contrary there is no other source for the
pure ego but oneself and only oneself, constituting itself, reducing at once the
world and oneself in all its natural modalities of apprehension (the double
epochê). The sharp divide between Aquinas/Descartes and Husserl reveals to
us with new clarity the unbridgeable distance that separates the infinite and
finite and that many contemporary phenomenologies carry on in their turn as
some sort of criterion of phenomenological orthodoxy. Once the impressions
of the Word within the self (Aquinas) and the divine guarantee (Descartes)
are refused, there rises up with force the famous objection of solipsism that
inaugurates the fifth Cartesian Meditation: Husserl asks whether from the
moment of the march toward the transcendental ego has one not “become a
solus ipse . . .” all alone?21 It is here that we can return with renewed vigor
to the interrogation of angelology pursued by Aquinas when he asks: “Can
an angel know another angel?” (Ia, q. 56, a. 2). Likewise, again, the father of
phenomenology asks: “What about other egos?” (Cart. Med., §42).
The Exit from Angelic Solipsism into an Alter-Angelology

Husserl announces early on the necessity of an exit from the egological soli-
tude of the subject or the urgency of “breaking the circle” (Cart. Med. §42).
Yet he accomplishes it only much later (Cart. Med. §50). Does this suggest
that the angel in its natural immateriality is able to escape such a detour?
With the goal of an exit from angelic solipsism starting from the constitution
of an “alter-angelology” (angel/angel), the proximity of the angelic ego of
Thomas and the transcendental ego of Husserl emerges anew: just as in fact
Husserl distinguishes between the “march toward the transcendental ego”
(first Cartesian Meditation) and “the determination of the transcendental
domain as phenomenological intersubjectivity” (fifth Cartesian Meditation),
so also does Thomas Aquinas distinguish between the self-knowledge of the
angel (Ia, q. 56, a. 1) and the knowledge of one angel by another (Ia, q. 56,
a. 2).
Immediacy and Mediation. At the heart of the quarrel between Thomas Aqui-
nas and Arab philosophy—which immediately brings to mind Henri Corbin’s
fight waged against historic Christian theology by way of recourse to Islam,
as we saw above—the Angelic Doctor adopts an original position that fights
simultaneously on two fronts: against Averroes on the one hand, who makes
the angel capable of knowing the essence of other angels without interme-
diary, and against Avicenna, on the other hand, legitimating a possible and
total knowledge of one angel by another starting from its own essence. Hence
238 The Other
immediate knowledge of the essence of the other and mediate knowledge by

the essence of the self are the two boundaries not to be crossed according to
Thomas Aquinas. Against Averroes, Thomas must challenge the impossible
infringement of the intimate and immanent union of the act of knowledge
and the object known in the angel: in its indivisible unity, the angel is only
able to know itself in its own essence and not the essence of the other angel,
otherwise the angel risks being divided against itself. Against Avicenna it is
necessary to refute the idea of a common essence among the angels, which
realizes—as if each angel was not already in itself its own species—only the
common genre of the angels but not each angel in its specific individuality.
Let us retain only two essential points from this debate: against Aver-
roes, the angel alone knows itself integrally in its own essence (and it is not
known in this way by other angels), and against Avicenna, knowledge of the
other angel by an angelic subject—its alter ego—cannot be had starting from
the knowledge of its own essence (hence the necessary recourse to another
mode of knowledge that Thomas will term knowledge by similitudes, as we
will shortly see).22 In phenomenological terms that will join us back up with
Husserl, the first position sacrifices the ego in that it divides the angelic ego
from itself (what Husserl calls the sphere of immanence), whereas the second
cheaply loses alterity by dissolving into a genre which alters the specificity of
the other (against which Husserl is also fighting when he prohibits the reduc-
tion of the monadic community of the ego to a pure identity of monads). For
Thomas therefore, inter-angelology requires, as does Husserl in the constitu-
tion of intersubjectivity, that egoity and alterity are held together at the same
time. In this way do their solutions principally appear, if not identical, at
least parallel: in Thomas’s use of similitudes (similitudines) in Ia, q. 56, a. 2,
resp., and Husserl’s use of the analogizing knowledge of the other in Cart.
Med. §50.
Analogy and Similitude. “Do angels know each other? [Utrum unus ange-
lus alium cognoscat]?”23 In order to respond to this question, Thomas first
recalls (in a way that evokes the transparency of the Husserlian ego) that only
the angel knows himself perfectly in his own nature and its causes: “Each
angel has received the reason of its own species [ratio suae speciei] according
to both natural and intelligible being [secundum esse naturale et intelligi-
bile].”24 To say that each angel knows itself perfectly according to natural
being (secundum esse naturale) implies that it has natural and immediate
access to itself by means of its own substance (evening knowledge) and with-
out the mediation of any species imprinted on it. For Thomas, the angel is for
itself “a form subsisting in a natural being . . . like the color in the wall that
possesses a natural being,” as a necessary category of its own substance.25
Concerning angelic knowledge of another angel or any other creature: such
is not operated according to natural being (by substance) but only accord-
ing to intelligible being: “The reasons of other natures both corporeal and
spiritual are impressed only according to intellectual being [secundum esse

intelligibile tantum], so that by these impressed species [per species impres-
sas] it is able to know spiritual and corporeal creatures.”26 By contrast to the
Word, in whom the reasons of things preexist according to their nature, the
substance (nature and cause) of an angel remains therefore, for another angel,
always opaque or forbidden. Such is not a fault of its nature—since nothing
that can be known remains unknown to it—but rather only conformity to its
creaturely status and respect for the divine omnipotence. As a created being,
the angel is certainly not the cause of any created thing. No more than the
foreman is able to produce or modify the plan of the architect, even as he
knows his designs, so the angel is not able to know another angel according
to the reasons of its nature or the substance in which it receives from God,
as an architect, the intelligible reasons. These reasons (rationes) that Thomas
names the “species impressae” (impressed species) are therefore impressed on
the angelic intellect by the divine Word so that by him an angel gains knowl-
edge of another angel and of all creation. In terms that remain Thomist—of
which the phenomenological accents ought not to be lost on us—the angel
knows another angel not “according to its natural being” (secundum esse
naturale), but “according to its intentional being” (secundum esse intentio-
nale).27 The intentionality of the other angel, in order to take up the Thomist
example of color, does not make it known in its substance (like color which
is substance only for the wall), but only according to its intentional being, as
“in the medium that communicates color to the eye (light) and thus having
only an intentional being.”28
The paradigm of light as support of the intentionality of the other—
whether alter-angelus of Thomas or alter-ego of Husserl—is understood here
as that which authorizes a certain knowledge of the other without reducing
it to the total transparence to itself enjoyed by the ego. God does not “give”
one angel to another in order to be known in what they are and in the reasons
for which they are, but only in what they have in common when they are:
namely, the being of receptacles of the intelligible ideas that God inscribes in
them. In a similar way to the communion of saints (supra), the community
of the world shared by angels is enacted therefore not in their being or in
their reasons for being, but only by reference to the divine Word who alone
exists most fully. The intentionality of the other angel or of the alter-angelus
in Thomas, like the intentionality of the other or of the alter-ego in Husserl,
is therefore founded on a third term—the light of the Word in Thomas, the
common world in Husserl—which alone opens access to alterity.
Toward a Common Term. In the context of inter-angelological knowledge,

such a community, if not of nature at least of the world of divine light shared
among the angels, renders null and void any scheme of causality and reserves
the creationist model to God alone. The created spiritual natures are tied
together in a relation, not of causality but of resemblance or similitude:
240 The Other
“Even if there is no causality [absque causalitate] among the angels, a shared

similitude [similitude] is sufficient for them to be known.”29 This establish-
ment of a double similitude or a “redoubled similitude” among the angels
and then between the angels and God finally makes possible the constitution
of an inter-angelology. The first similitude is the likeness of the angel to God
inasmuch as it is the most perfect created image of the latter: “The knowl-
edge of angels is closer to specular knowledge since the angelic nature is like
a mirror [quoddam speculum] which presents the likeness of God [divinam
similitudinem repraesentans].”30
Thus the second similitude, of angel to angel, arises by their common
capacity to understand—not to produce—the first similitude between the
uncreated and the created: “The relations of causality have nothing to do
at all with the knowledge of one angel by another, except by reason of the
similitude [nisi ratione similitudinis] that they establish between cause and
effect.”31 One angel knows another not by penetrating its substance or pro-
ducing its cause, but only by recognizing in it, by means of its impressed
species applied by God (and which God alone knows perfectly), the same
capacity to receive the divine creative power and to be its image. Only such
a “redoubled similitude”—between the angels and God and then among
the angels themselves—founds a community of world shared by the angels,
which finally makes possible an inter-angelology through an escape from
angelic solipsism. In phenomenological and Husserlian terms, the angelic ego
escapes from the solitude of its solus ipse by the analogizing knowledge of
the other angel as image of God and capacity to receive his image. The other
angel or alter-angelus, however, remains in its nature an enigma to the angel
who seeks to know it (rather like the insoluble enigma of the fourth term in
the Husserlian experience of the flesh as touching-touched, as I described in
chapter 6, above)—yet they nevertheless know each other, or better, recognize
each other in that they both partake of the same relation to God the Creator.
Here they become for each other an alter-angelology.
The typically Husserlian accents of the exit from angelic solipsism in
Thomas Aquinas—not in the nature of the concepts per se but rather in the
progressive unfolding of his thought—ought not to escape the awareness of
those who have at least a cursory understanding of Husserl’s solution. In §50
of the Cartesian Meditations, what makes possible the coupling or pairing
(Paarung) together with the other is not a flight from the ego but, well to the
contrary, a constitution of the alterity of the other starting from the very ego.
The alter ego, always unfathomable in its own nature, is posed as an apo-
dictic evidence starting from its resemblance (or similitude for Thomas) with
my own sphere of belonging. “It is clear from the very beginning that only a
similarity connecting, within my primordial sphere, that body over there with
my body can serve as the motivational basis for the ‘analogizing’ apprehen-
sion of that body as another animate organism [another flesh].”32 No more
than the human ego of Husserl escapes from its ego to constitute the other by
its analogizing apperception, so the angelic ego of Thomas ought not to dis-
card its self-transparency in order to know by similitude the ego of the other
angel (a knowledge thus of its functions more than its nature). Even further,
while only the appearing of a “common world” can definitively found the
intersubjectivity of the alter-ego (in §55 of the Cartesian Meditations), only a
God shared as unsurpassable horizon of the angelic world makes possible an
inter-angelology (in the second article of question 56 of the Summa, 1a pars).
Can we go any further in the comparative analysis of Thomist angelology
and Husserlian egology? In the end, if these seem to be drawn together, as
far as kinds and styles of solutions are posed, as exits from solipsism, it nev-
ertheless appears as if their respective contents cannot be any farther apart:
for Thomas, the constitution of the alter-angelus by immaterial species and
innate ideas, and, for Husserl, the constitution of the alter-ego by flesh (Leib)
and body (Körper).
The Debate about the Flesh of Angels
Reduction to the Sphere of Ownness

Pure Spirits? Contrary to Thomist angelology, the constitution of an “inter-
subjective sphere of belonging” in Husserl is created by the constitutive power
of the flesh in correlation to the body. It does not start from the lone ideality
of the ego. There is nothing more opposed, at least at the level of the second
reduction (that is, to the flesh and not only to the ego), than Thomist inter-
a ngelology and Husserlian inter-subjectivity. In order to carry this opposition
to full term, and by virtue of the Husserlian reinvestment of corporeity, we
would still have to show in a definitive and radical way that the angels have
not adopted bodies. Setting aside the virtually obsolete debates on the “flesh
of angels,” the question of angelic corporeity remains no less a fundamental
theologoumenon. However, from the dogmatic point of view, the ecumenical
councils have not, properly speaking, settled the question. The decree of Lat-
eran Council IV (1215), virtually contemporaneous with Thomas Aquinas,
states that God is “the unique principle of all things, creator of all visible and
invisible beings, spiritual and incorporeal . . . that is, the angelic creatures and
those of this world.” To be sure, this council was less interested in defining the
corporeal or spiritual nature of the angels than in their properly creaturely
state that they share with those substances ordinarily called corporeal.33 The
theological upshot (which we cannot take up in the context of this study) is
that the spirituality of the angel cannot, I suggest, be threatened in its nature
by any corporeity.
Nevertheless, considering only the apparitions of angels in the scriptures
(and thus ignoring abstract theological quibbles), the solution to this ques-
tion does not seem self-evident. Listen only to Thomas Aquinas: “Some claim
242 The Other
that the angels never assume a body and that all the apparitions mentioned
in Scripture take the form of prophetic visions, or in other words that they
are only visions of the imagination . . . But repeatedly the Scriptures speak
of angels who appear as if everyone saw them. This is the case for the angels
that appeared to Abraham: they are seen by him, his whole family, by Lot and
all the inhabitants of Sodom. Similarly, all see the angel who appears to Tobit.
These demonstrate that such manifestations take place in bodily visions, of
which the object, exterior to the subject, can be seen by everyone. The object
of such a vision can therefore only be a real body [tali autem visione non
videtur nisi corpus].”34
Barely has Aquinas admitted the reality of such an angelic corporeity (at
least in order to appear to man) that he hastens to add: “Since the angels are
not bodies and do not have bodies, sometimes they assume a body [angeli
corpora assumant].”35 Such an assumption of a body by the angels in order
to appear to man is not self-evident, since precisely, and contrary to us
humans, they are not a body and do not have a body. We must therefore ask
if indeed a passage is necessary, at least theologically, from a disincarnated
inter-angelology (angel/angel) to an incorporated inter-angelo-anthropology
(angel/man).
Angelic Incorporation and Christic Incarnation. We will not broach here

the famous debate about hylomorphism applied to the angel and which had
divided the medieval West between Muslim thinkers (Averroes and Avicenna)
and Christian thinkers (Bonaventure and Duns Scotus). Let us only take note
that the original position adopted by Aquinas consists in understanding the
angel less in terms of matter and form but rather in potency and act (which
justifies our preceding analysis of angelic intuition in terms of the actuality of
knowledge and of the known): “If in the angel there is not the composition of
matter and form, there is however composition of act and potency” (Ia, q. 50,
a. 2, ad. 3). Armed with such a solution in principle, we can approach anew
the question of angelic corporeity in the history of theology in order finally
to confront it with the Husserlian sense of corporeity.
As we have already emphasized in relation to the solidity of the flesh
in Tertullian, it is fitting to distinguish the angelic incorporation from the
Christological incarnation. In his De carne Christi, Tertullian opposes to
the Gnostic Marcion a necessary distinction between the flesh of Christ and
the flesh of angels. And in the face of the strong development of the Judeo-
C
hristian theme of the Christos Angelos, for Tertullian Christ does not take
on flesh in the same way as the angel does in its appearance to man: “Con-
sequently I summon those who propose that the flesh of Christ, after the
example of angels, is not born even as it was made flesh, to confront the
reasons why Christ as well as the angels have appeared in the flesh [in carne
processerint]. No angel has ever descended in order to be crucified, to know
death, to be resurrected. Never have the angels had such a reason to take on
a body [corporandum] and this is the reason why they have not been incar-
nated [acceperint carnem] by the passage of birth: not having come in order
to die, they have not come either to be born. But the Christ, sent in order
to die, necessarily had to be born in order to be able to die [nasci quoque
necessario habuit ut mor posset].”36 If I can be allowed here a Heideggerian
interpretation that is a little rash, the flesh of Christ is first and principally
a “flesh for death” (ut mori), and therefore also for resurrection. The flesh
of angels, however, is at best a flesh for appearing (in carne processerint),
but not for birth and death. Thus, very early on in the history of theology
(and in order to counter the Gnostic heresies) the incorporation of angels (ad
corporandum) and the incarnation of Christ (acceperit carnem) came to be
distinguished.
We have not yet mentioned the relevance of Origen to the question of the
angels, though in his Peri Archôn he follows Tertullian but further specifies
the terms. If he attributes a corporeity to the angels—which he terms “subtle”
or “ethereal”—such a corporeity has nothing to do with the Christic incar-
nation. When the resurrected Christ first appears to the Eleven, he shows
himself to them precisely as an anti-angel, beyond and below the angelic
state, namely that he did not assume (at least merely) an angelic corpore-
ity: “Look at my hands and feet. It is I. Look, touch me: a spirit does not
have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Lk. 24:36). Even beyond the
phenomenological accent of a resurrected Christ who appears “in flesh and
bone” (Cart. Med., §50), though protecting ourselves against an overly hasty
interpretation, such words as these require a distinction between a Christic
flesh or body and an angelic body. Origen concludes from this: “Christ does
not have a body like those of the demons, for theirs is something subtle, like
a light breath, which most think is incorporeal. But Christ has a solid and
tangible body [corpus solidum et palpabile].”37
When Origen grants to the demons and spirits a certain kind of cor-
poreity, but of a nature both ethereal and subtle, it is done less in order to
confer on them a body than it is to conserve for the Trinity alone an exclusive
and total incorporeality: “It is a privilege of the nature of God, Father, Son
and Holy Spirit to understand their existence apart from any material sub-
stance [sine materiali substantia] and any association with bodily addition
[absque ulla corporeae adiectionis].”38 The definitive doctrine of the Fathers,
confirmed by the ecumenical councils with the homoousios will be: on the
one hand, the complete immateriality and non-corporeality of the Holy Trin-
ity, and on the other hand, the solid and tangible corporeality of the Word
made flesh. When Henri Corbin accuses this very doctrine of being the locus
of the ruin of the theology of angels, let us observe in response only that the
problem is in fact resolved from the moment that it is suppressed. Yet the
entire task of Christian angelology consists precisely in attempting to give
meaning and form to an appearance of angels that is always subaltern to
both the Trinitarian non-corporeity and the Christic corporeity.
244 The Other
Bodies without Flesh? It is Augustine who confirms this distinction between

angelic incorporation and Christic incarnation in a dazzling formula from
Sermon 362: cum essent angelic corpus, non caro, “since the angels are bod-
ies, they are not flesh.”39 Flesh and body—and let us recall the title of Didier
Franck’s famous book40—though truly “caro et corpus” and not “Leib und
Körper.” Here at least the distinction is critical (supra). Is the superposition
possible? We ought to doubt it, as has already been suggested in relation to
Tertullian. Nevertheless this remains minimally the index of a major difficulty
yet to be resolved, theologically as much as philosophically. And perhaps this
is the reason why Augustine (and we with him) hesitates about the status of
angelic incorporation, particularly once distinguished from Trinitarian non-
c orporeity and Christic corporeity: “I must confess it is beyond my powers
of penetration to settle one question I have just alluded to: do angels work
through the constant and stable spiritual quality of their own bodies to take
and fit to themselves some grosser matter from the lower elements which they
can change and turn rather like clothes into any physical manifestation they
please, even into true ones, as our Lord turned true water into true wine (Jn.
2:9)? Or do they transform their own proper bodies into whatever form they
wish as it suits their purposes [accommodate ad id quod agunt]?”41
Does the angel truly have or simply borrow a body? The question is open.
The task is Aquinas’s to resolve. Yet every angelic body, to be sure—whether
borrowed or true—has no other sense but to appear accommodate ad id
quod agunt (“in relation to the work that they have to accomplish”). This
new dimension of appearing for (whether something or someone) leads us,
properly speaking, into a phenomenology of the angel, which attempts to
escape from a purely ontic or reified conception of the body. Now tied to this
line of ontic corporeity and phenomenological corporeity is the crucial and
exemplary relation of Thomas Aquinas and Edmund Husserl.
A Phenomenology of the Angel

Definition of the Phenomenon. At phenomenology’s very point of departure,
in the Logical Investigations, the original concept of the phenomenon first
designates the “concept of what appears or what can appear, of the intuitive
as such.”42 The phenomenal object is therefore both the intuited object hic et
nunc (this lamp along with the value it has for the perception that one comes
to have of it) and the concrete, subjective lived experience of this intuition
(for example, when we perceive the lamp sitting there in front of us).43 On
the one hand, the appearance is always addressed to a proper subject ready
to receive it, and on the other hand, the appearance is necessarily tied to an
object (ideal or concrete) capable of producing it. Therefore the phenomenon
in no way designates an illusion but rather the thing itself appearing to con-
sciousness, my consciousness, such as it appears. In this sense—as we have
already made mention in relation to Eckhartian “detachment” as a mode
of the “reduction”—phenomenology renounces and suspends all ontological

questioning about the quid of the thing or its nature and is interested only
in its quomodo, that is, its modes of appearing. Starting from this definition
of the phenomenon, on which the fifth Cartesian Meditation takes root, a
phenomenology of the angel becomes possible, yet only to the degree that
the angel as such appears and insofar as such an appearance is necessarily
accompanied in me by an intuitive, originary lived experience.
A Body for Appearing. The “transcendental reduction to the sphere of

belonging” or to the “sphere of owness” (Cart. Med., §44), for Husserl, con-
sists precisely in suspending, in a redoubled reduction that is no longer merely
eidetic (starting from the bodily ego), everything that is not me and therefore
foreign, including intentionality itself. The point of departure of this new
work of reduction—and which is of crucial significance to the question of
the corporeity and alterity of angels—is, Husserl says, “first to abstract from
that which confers on animals and humans their specific character as living
and personal beings.”44 The perception of the body of the other will therefore
not be that of its objective body (Körper) equipped with its specific traits
as a biological “living being.” If it is necessary to live and to have a body in
order to appear (Leib), this life does not first designate the collection of traits
constitutive of the living. Here the door opens to a possible phenomenology
of the angel starting from Thomist angelology.
In the tradition that passes from Tertullian to Origen and Augustine, the
angels do not appear as such to man, but rather “in relation to the work that
they have to accomplish”—accommodate ad id quod agunt (Augustine).45
The first proper determination of the angel consists therefore in being the
envoy or messenger of God to men (mal’ak in Hebrew and angelos in Greek).
If every angelic appearing is not necessarily tied to speech—as in Saint Fran-
cis’s vision of the winged Seraph in the form of the cross, for example, where,
precisely, the flesh itself became speech in the experience of the stigmata—it
never remains gratuitous or arbitrary in the context of Christian theology
for the simple reason that it always claims to be an expression of an Other.
This is why, as we have already had occasion to emphasize, when Thomas
Aquinas affirms that “the angels are not a body and do not have a body that
is naturally united to them [but] they sometimes assume a body [corpora
assumant],” he immediately hastens to add that the angelic assumption of
a body is not “in itself” as nature or substance, but is only “for our sake”
(propter nos) to whom the angel appears: “It is not for themselves [propter
seipsos] that the angels have need to assume a body, but for our sake [propter
nos].”46 And Descartes, whom we have seen renouncing the debate on the
nature of the angels in his interview with Burman, did not finally seem to
answer anything in concluding that “it is best for us to follow Scripture and
believe that they were young men, or appeared as such, and so forth.”47
246 The Other
In phenomenological terms, the intercorporeity of the angelic body and

human body (and thus no longer simply an intra-angelic intersubjectivity) is
left to be elucidated in Thomas Aquinas, insofar as the intentionality of the
body of one—albeit only assumed and not constitutive of its nature—has
meaning and its raison d’être only in and through its manifestation to the
other. The suspension of all ontic position of corporeity and reduction to its
pure phenomenality: such is exactly the sense of the second reduction from
Körper to Leib that Husserl puts in operation. “Thus there is included in my
ownness . . . a sense, a ‘mere Nature’ that has lost precisely that ‘by every-
one’ and therefore must not by any means be taken for an abstract stratum
of the world . . . Among the bodies [Körper] belonging to this Nature and
included in my particular ownness, I then find my animate organism [Leib] as
uniquely singled out—namely as the only one of them that is not just a body
but precisely an animate organism [or flesh].”48
An Aftereffect for Phenomenology. In a synchronic reading of the history

of philosophy, by his distinction between Körper and Leib, Husserl extends
in a certain conceptual manner—at least at the level of the sole modalities
of the manifestation of the body and its flesh—the Thomist imperatives for
angelic corporeity that assumes a body and appears as such (phenomenal
body) without however being itself a body (objective body). In the same way
that the angel alone knows itself perfectly and escapes from the solitude of
its ego by virtue of the similitudes shared with the other angel, so also does
the same angel uniquely seem capable of adopting for man this type of mani-
festation of a corporeity totally freed from all natural position in order to be
made visible to others. The first reduction to the ego and the second reduc-
tion to corporeity both seem capable of being deciphered, at least in part, in
a contemporary rereading of Thomist angelology guided by Husserl’s Carte-
sian Meditations.
But in order to lead this process of intercorporeity between angels and
men (inter-angelo-anthropology) to completion in its mode of appearing for
the other, a last question with new Husserlian resonance remains unresolved:
is the angel who assumes a body for my sake able to dwell in his body as
I am incarnate in my flesh by the successive series of its kinestheses? This
interrogation, crucial in the virtually insurmountable distance that it creates
between Thomas and Husserl, could in fact render void the entirety of the
enterprise that I have undertaken. For if the angel is not able to dwell in its
own body as I am incarnate in my own, how could it then, in rigorous terms,
address itself to me and accompany me toward a community of angels and
the blessed? If there is indeed a mutual knowledge among the angels start-
ing from the similitudes impressed on them by the Word, are they not then
ever condemned to remain locked up in this angelic monadic community, no
longer able to appear for the other since this other is no longer only the other
himself (other angel, alter ego) but the other than himself (man, ego alter)?
Rilke’s nostalgia in the Duino Elegies for the angel suffering from too much
perfection is probably justified here. And the dream of the angel Damiel—
“to have a fever, fingers blackened from the journal, feeling his frame when
walking or finally feeling what it is like to remove his shoes under the table
and stretch his toes”—vanishes here into the realms of an ever-unrealizable
utopia.49 And yet, against the temptation of holding the angel in check in
its communication with man, should we still maintain with Pierre Boutang
that “the article of Thomas Aquinas entitled ‘Do angels know singulars’ is a
text which could without a doubt rescue Rilke from his most profound evil
without sacrificing his poetic genius”? Here “the ninth Elegy would be totally
different, without a doubt.”50
Toward a Common World of Angels and Men
In response to the question “is the angel able to dwell in its body as I am
incarnate in mine?” in relation to which Rainer- Maria Rilke and Wim
Wenders are the prophets of our time, I should say—if I still dare here to use
phenomenology—that it is not theologically speaking the nature of the angel to
be able to experience my lived sensory experiences or Erlebnis, by reason of its
substantial (as opposed to phenomenological) incorporeity, such that I always
experience myself, that is to say, starting from the passive syntheses of my
senses. In this sense, therefore, there is nothing in common between the angel
and man and the enterprise collapses on itself. Aquinas himself formulates
this objection of an unbridgeable gulf between purely spiritual creatures and
those that are spiritual and corporeal—and thereby transposes the question of
sensory lived experience to that of the apprehension of singulars: “Knowledge
is a kind of assimilation of knower to the known. But it seems impossible that
the angel is assimilated to the singular as singular, since it is immaterial and the
singular has matter as a principle. The angel is therefore not able to know sin-
gulars.”51 A phenomenological response to the argument, which would make
possible for the angel a knowledge of singulars for which access seems reserved
to man, calls for the satisfaction of a twofold requirement: the angel ought to
be able to be substituted for me and occupy my place which ordinarily befits
me in my here (hic) (what Husserl calls the “apperceptive transposition start-
ing from my own body”), and what is sensed (the sensed object) is effectively
the object as I would sense it if its over there (illic) were my here (hic). Upon
this twofold requirement will rest, as we will see later (in the following chapter
on Duns Scotus), the knowledge of the other as a singular being.
The Angel in My Place

Responding to the first requirement for a possible “apperceptive transposi-
tion” of the angel and man demands that we make a return to the meaning
248 The Other
of the constitution of alterity. The operation of the encounter of the other as

other, starting from my flesh, is operated first according to Husserl by a fic-
tion, namely that of a “liberation of my [own] perspective and a transfer into
another perspective.”52 The other does not remain other to me to the degree
that I accept to enter also into the analogical dimension of “as if I here were
also over there” (Cart. Med., §54). The Husserlian theme of the here and the
there, starting from a here from which the world appears, seems to respond
again, like an echo, to the question of the “local movement of angels” as
elaborated by Thomas Aquinas (Ia, q. 53). Even more—and to highlight the
implicit Husserlian ideal of angelic knowledge (which Jean-Louis Chrétien
brought out in his article, “Le langage des anges selon la scolastique”)53—the
local movement of angels in their appearing for man may sometimes stretch
to the accomplishment, in a paradigmatic fashion, of this which, in humanity,
is always only an imaginative fiction. The impossible but ideal and necessary
substitution of the here for the over there constitutive of human intersubjec-
tivity for Husserl, seems paradoxically to be realized in the possible, real, and
total—though under different modes—“apperceptive transposition” of the
angel and man in Thomas.
Here and There. For man at least, the here and there are clearly distinguished
for Thomas and Husserl in a kind of continuous movement, meaning the
switch from one place to another that is common to the community of
the living: “The continuity of local bodily movement results from the fact
that the body leaves in a successive and not sudden manner the place in
which it previously appeared.” In this sense, the material body of man, like
every material body, “is localized because it is contained and measured by
place.”54 However, for the angel, the here and there is distinguished with
difficulty to the degree that the spiritual creature alone, unique among all
creatures in this way, is made capable of leaving or remaining in a place
without continuity or contact with surrounding bodies: “The angel is able
to leave instantaneously [simul] the place that it occupies, and can occupy
instantaneously any other place. Thus its movement is not continuous.” Thus
the angel “far from being measured by place, rather contains it.”55 Among
all the creatures, only the angel seems capable of passing from one place
to another instantaneously (simul). Of course, this does not mean that the
same angel is capable of occupying two places at the same time—the gift of
ubiquity remains the singular privilege of God, and particularly of Christ in
his post-paschal appearances—but only as it is able to occupy every perspec-
tive (the Abschattungen of Husserl) successively, in passing instantaneously
from one perspective to another or one place to another. But the very notion
of instantaneity (instanti), Aquinas specifies, is no longer a rigorous enough
term adequate to the angel. Containing time more than it is contained by it,
we are finally obliged “to say that there is no extreme moment during which
the angel would be the starting point.” When the angel is here I am assured
that he is not there, but since he is no longer here I cannot know if he is

already there or not. I grasp the angel—or better: the angel grasps me—when
it is with me. But as soon as it is no longer here, I can no longer discern where
it is. Further, knowing only its “here” (hic), if it is my own here at the same
time, nothing prevents the possibility that its “over there” (illic) that I do not
yet know is already also my “future here,” that “hence” (illinc) I still only
consider a distant “over there.” The “over there” of the angel “from whence”
the world already appears to it is already perhaps my “future over there”
where the angel, awaiting me there, welcomes me from the moment that it
gets to my “present here.” By the yardstick of this Husserlian scheme of the
here and there the entire peregrination of the angel Raphael with Tobit is able
to be reinterpreted, the angel who both marches before and follows behind in
the form of a dog, “accompanying Tobit and arranging felicitously everything
that happens to him” (Tb. 5:27).
What is only an imaginative fiction in Husserl, transposing me to the over
there of the other while I remain here, seems to be fully realized in the angelo-
a nthropological interaction as described by Thomas Aquinas in the question on
the movement of the angels. This will make evident the meaning and mission
of the guardian angel in the treatise on the divine government in the Summa,
who could both accept to prepare my over there by its here (“every man,” says
Thomas, “in the pilgrim state receives a guardian angel”),56 as well as tempo-
rarily to refuse straightforwardly such a welcome in order not to be substituted
for the divine here that its command first designates as mine (“the guardian
angel never fully abandons man, but sometimes it partially abandons him in
the sense that it does not prevent him from being submitted to some test, or
even from falling into sin, according to the orders of the divine judgment”).57
Does the “apperceptive transposition” of the angel and man, once realized,
and therefore released from the merely analogical modality of the “as if,”
allow the angel effectively to sense things such as I sense them (according to
my Erlebnis), and such as they are when I sense them (in their Erscheinungen)?
The Guardian Angel. Responding to this second requirement of a common

angelo-
anthropological phenomenality— and thus achieving the constitu-
tion of a common world shared by angels and men, and not merely between
angels alone—requires that we return once again to the nostalgia of Rainer-
M
aria Rilke and Wim Wenders: does the angel really suffer from the weight
of too much perfection? Does the angel possess a perennial envy of the human
condition, like Damiel who makes the irreversible decision for a human
incarnation at the foot of the Berlin Wall? Falsely condemned, as the first
part of Wenders’s film suggests, to observe the world through a prism of only
black and white shades, is the angel not rather in reality the one who from
all eternity already partakes of the colors of the world—those that appear to
us and those that we do not yet know—albeit otherwise than that which is
appropriate for us humans?
250 The Other
Neither being a body nor having one, but only “assuming” one, the angel
evidently cannot apprehend singulars such as we do, namely, starting from
the passive syntheses of our senses. The critique of Wenders, Rilke, and even
of some thinkers from the Middle Ages (Averroes, Avicenna, Bonaventure)
begins precisely here, inasmuch as each, in his own way, does not hesitate
to reject the possibility that angels, and even God (Averroes, for example),
could know singulars.58 By contrast, Thomas asserts that this negation of the
knowledge of singulars for angels is both “contrary to the Catholic faith” as
to divine providence: “If the angels do not know singulars, they cannot exer-
cise any providence through activities in the world, since every action has for
its principle a singular being.”59 The guardian angel in fact ought to reg(u)ard
everything that I regard—in the double sense of that which concerns me, and
that which I am focused on—in order, precisely, to guard me. If, however, by
virtue of its incorporeal nature, the angel does not apprehend the singulars
in the way that I do, how does it know them? Everything that goes under the
name of my sensitive powers (sight, touch, hearing, taste, smell), the angel
also knows, says Thomas, but not by means of these powers themselves,
for its perception is definitively unified, but by means of a single faculty of
knowledge—the intellect (intellectum)—which is alone capable of embracing
every singular even to the smallest detail: “The order of things is such that
the more elevated a being is, the more its power has unity and extension . . .
The angel is by order of nature superior to man. It is unreasonable therefore
to say that man knows by any one of his faculties something that the angel
does not know by its unique faculty of knowledge [per unam vim suam cog-
noscitivam] which is the intellect [scilicet intellectum].”60
Knowledge of Sensibles. Nothing that I apprehend by my senses in a scat-

tered and diverse fashion is prohibited to the angel who also attains to it,
though not by sensation but rather starting from its unique faculty of intel-
ligence. For an angel to know sensibles as sensibles does not mean that it
knows only the universal causes (as Avicenna proposed). Here the angel is
like an “astronomer who knows the eclipse only in its general conditions
and not in the particular circumstances of its time and place, which only sen-
sible knowledge is able to reach.”61 Such a knowledge of the eclipse through
causes, as we have already seen above, is essentially reserved to God alone,
the architect of the world. As for knowledge in its singularity and its par-
ticular circumstances of time and place, the angel receives these through the
power of God by infused species (morning knowledge in the supernatural
light of the Word) like the master communicating to one of his disciples an
idea that the disciple could not produce himself: “The angels, by the species
that God infuses in them, know things in their universal nature as well as in
their singularity, as these species are multiple representations of the simple
and unique essence of God” (Ia, q. 57, a. 2, resp.). To return to the example of
the eclipse, while God alone possesses the power to produce it, as a creature
the angel, along with man, partakes of the power to admire it, but the angel
by his intellect in the divine light and man by his senses in the world. In this
way both together see a single and same eclipse though in different ways.
The hierarchy of the angels and the logic of the return to God are inverted
here in a paradoxical chassé-croisé movement: the more the angel is elevated
in knowledge of intelligibles and thus approaches God, the more in fact it is
abased—as an accompaniment, it seems, to the kenosis of the Word—in the
knowledge of sensibles.62
Faraway, so close!—the farther away the angel is from the sensibles in
order to contemplate God, at the same time he is drawn nearer to that which
is given to be seen by man. Knowing from all eternity the sensibles as sensi-
bles but not through sensation, there is hardly any need for the angel Damiel
of Wings of Desire to be surprised by the colors of the Berlin Wall after his
fall into a body. It has already been given to him from time immemorial to see
them in the infused light of the Word. Yet in order to do this it is necessary
for him to exercise the eye of his intelligence by turning it to this infused light
that contains the whole of man and the world.
A Community of Worlds
An Analogon of Singulars. Like the communion of saints (chap. 7), but
now through a common knowledge of singulars, even under their respective
modalities, there emerges a common world between angels and men: seeing
things by way of different organs (sensations for men and intelligence for
angels) does not prevent them from seeing the same thing. Here a new kind
of similitude or analogon is deciphered, similar to the identity of relations
discovered among angels, but now this analogon is no longer simply knowl-
edge of universals (sufficient for the knowledge of another angel by infusion
of divine light), but knowledge of universals as they make known at the same
time singularity as it is simultaneously inscribed in the world and God: “The
angels know singulars through universal forms regarding both their universal
principles as similitudes of things [similitudines rerum] and their principles of
individuation.”63 Such a community of worlds between angels and men does
not imply, however, that it is necessary to reduce the angel to man, no more
than in Husserl the community of monads sharing the same world reduces
alterity but rather reinforces it.64
In fact, if there is an analogy between angels and men concerning what is
known (singulars), this similitude is not reiterated in the mode according to
which the thing is known (intelligence/sensation). As Husserl emphasized,
if there is an analogy between the body of the other and my own body (“It
is clear from the very beginning that only a similarity connecting, within
my primordial sphere, that body over there with my body can serve as the
motivational basis for the ‘analogizing’ apprehension of that body as another
animate organism [another flesh]”),65 this analogy does not make of the body
252 The Other
of the other a pure analogon or image of what is appropriate for me (“what I

actually see is not a sign and not a mere analogue, a depiction in any natural
sense of the word; on the contrary, it is someone else”).66 The fact that the
angel knows what I know, though under a different mode, does not turn me
into an angel or the angel into a man. To the contrary, precisely because we
know the same things without knowing them in the same way, we can indeed
appear to each other as other (ego alter) on the ground of the identity not of
our natures but of the world that we share together: “It is implicit in the sense
of my successful apperception of others that their world, the world belonging
to their appearance systems, must be experienced forthwith as the same as
the world belonging to my appearance-systems; and this involves an identity
of our appearance-systems.”67
An Irreducible Alterity. In the context of a Thomist angelology read in light

of the Cartesian Meditations, the angel and man seem therefore first called
to appear to each other. In order to respect, of course, the necessary distance
and alterity of the orders of creation, the angel is not reduced to man, and
vice versa. Although the one power takes the place of the other in an apper-
ceptive transposition of angel and man, knowing what the other knows in
an analogy of the world perceived in the apprehension of singulars, both
nevertheless remain irreducible to each other in their modalities of the appre-
hension of this common world (whether intellect or sensation). In the last
instance, therefore, the angel is not the alter ego of man but his ego alter that
ultimately shares with him, if not the same intentional aim in the world, at
least the same experience—irreducible to a psychological or moral mean-
ing—of the same world.
Swan Dive [Le Saut de L’ange]. Here in the appearing of the angel for another
there remains an insoluble enigma which is at the same time the same as the
ordinary experience of the other described by Husserl: “actually the sensu-
ously seen body is experienced forthwith as the body of someone else and not
as merely an indication of someone else. Is not this fact an enigma?”68 When
the angel appears to me, if I am made capable of seeing it, in its appearing to
me it does not remain only the index of its presence since its body is not prop-
erly speaking its body, but only what has been assumed in order to be seen
by my gaze. The angel, whether a subtle and ethereal body, as for Origen, or
a soul without a body but assuming one, as in Aquinas, the problem of the
angel fades before the One—the only one—who has already resolved the
enigma of the other in being given integrally as flesh and body for the other:
the incarnate Christ. Starting from this unique divine incarnation, what must
be thought or rethought theologically, and even phenomenologically, are all
the modalities of various incarnations, whether of man or of angels. In the
unique measure that it pleases God, as Saint Paul puts it, “to reconcile all
things through him and for him, whether on earth or in heaven” (Col. 1:20),
the angels, as “actors” [personnes de jeu] in the drama that rejoins man and
God, ought then to be reintegrated as “persons in Christ.” The angelic swan
dive [saut de l’ange] is performed in the incarnate and resurrected Word—
here courting, perhaps, the opposite risk of no longer existing. If the destiny
of the angels “is not contemporary with our drama,” says Hans Urs von
Balthasar, “yet it is not without relation to them.”69
Fortsetzung folgt. In a penultimate image, the angelic saga from Wings of

Desire is accomplished: “we have embarked.” At the last moment a ray of
sunlight comes finally to tear the sad sky of Berlin. In this way also does
the prologue of Saint John begin: “In the beginning was the Word . . . And
the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us. And we have beheld his
glory” (Jn. 1:1–14). The last image is that of a message (sent by an angel?)
inscribed on the screen: “To be continued.” Whether proclaimed by Rilke
or Wenders or as revealed in Thomist angelology properly understood, it is
because it all begins paradoxically when the wings of a nostalgic desire are
clipped, when the dove, as in the famous passage from Kant, stops “cleaving
in free flight the thin air, whose resistance it feels, [and] might imagine that its
flight would be still easier in empty space.”70 In an exemplary way with Duns
Scotus, and with the question of the angels always in mind, alterity will thus
increase progressively with singularity, by definitively obviating any neutral-
ity. The “haecceity of the other,” accomplishes full alterity (Duns Scotus) and
thus confers on the “community,” both logically and chronologically, its true
foundation in charity (Origen), and on intersubjectivity its authentic identity
(Aquinas).
Chapter 9
The Singular Other (John Duns Scotus)
From the Neutral to the Other

Angels “know singulars”—angeli singularia cognoscunt (Summa theologiae,
Ia, q. 57, a. 2)—albeit in a unique mode, by a successful “apperceptive trans-
position.” Following Thomas Aquinas we have shown that by means of this
shared knowledge a structure of alterity is truly constituted. At this point the
revelation of the other is not yet fully disclosed. It is only with Duns Scotus
that it emerges completely. For it is not sufficient to know the collection of
singular things in order to recognize them as singular. Haecceity stems from
actuality in that it identifies what is still lacking in being: “At the heart of
the real in Thomas Aquinas,” says Etienne Gilson, “the act of being is found;
in Duns Scotus haecceity is found.”1 This unique formula of the celebrated
medievalist is enough to justify my purpose, at least historically: the tode ti
or the hoc aliquid—the fact of being “this thing”—of the Subtle Doctor rises
to the level of the Angelic Doctor’s esse or act of being.
But for contemporary reflection the question of haecceity seems more
pertinent than actuality. Behind, or rather coming through the question of
individuation is the recent accusation of “neutrality” in contemporary phi-
losophy. Levinas’s charge against Heidegger, namely, that his ontology is
defined as a “philosophy of the neuter,” is well known: “To place the Neuter
dimension of being above the existent that which unbeknown to it this Being
would determine in some way . . . is to profess materialism. Heidegger’s late
philosophy becomes this faint materialism.”2 More recently Jean-Luc Marion
has turned the argument against Levinas himself and the irreducible vis-à-vis
of the face: “The injunction of obligation toward the other leads, in reality,
to the neutralization of the other as such.” In the substitution of the other for
every other by the face the other is not individualized to the point of becom-
ing “irreplaceable by any other.” Respect and responsibility, be they for me
or the other, establish in fact the other in the Kantian manner as an abstract
universal to which I am obliged, but not as this concrete singular who has
no other particularity then of being made, precisely, “other of every other.”
Haecceitas—a word if not directly from Scotus at least from the Scotist
255
256 The Other
tradition—will therefore designate the other “as such” because it provokes

me to make myself “a such.” We will therefore not be content with the face,
but will require of some such face that it envisage me in order to give me my
“form” singularly disentangled from every other.3
A second reason, also relevant to modern philosophy, invites a renewed
interrogation of haecceity, no longer as the singularization of the other, but
the individuation of the thing. On the forgetfulness of being is superimposed,
according to Heidegger, another forgetting, all the more forgotten as it is left
uninterrogated: “the thing.” Phenomenology, however, claims haecceity only
to forget it immediately. One ought only to remember Heidegger’s remarks
to his students in his 1936 course, What Is a Thing?, the little maid Thrace
laughing at Thales with his head lost in the stars: “The story is that Thales,
while occupied in studying the heavens above and looking up, fell into a well.
A good-looking and whimsical maid from Thrace laughed at him and told
him that while he might passionately want to know all things in the universe,
the things in front of his very nose and feet were unseen by him” (Plato, Thea-
tetus, 174a).4 And so goes, for Heidegger, the very drama of philosophy since
Plato: interrogating beings, the philosopher has lost the “meaning of things”
[sens des choses]—not in the sense of knowable objects but the things [des
affaires] that concern us (Sache in German or thing in English).5 But what
“concerns us” [fait notre affaire], according to the philosopher, is paradoxi-
cally much less the granite, flint, limestone, or sandstone—so many specific
determinations of the thing—but rather “the rock as thing,” “the thingness of
the thing.” As the famous example of the “luncheon on the grass” explains:
“we pose this question in order to know what a rock is, and a lizard taking a
sunbath on it, a blade of grass that grows beside it, and a knife which perhaps
we hold in our hands while we lie in the meadow.”6
The strangest thing is that Heidegger himself lacked that which he nev-
ertheless sought after so ardently: (a) first because he missed haecceity; (b)
second because he always attached the thing to its being an entity. (a) We
could have believed that his habilitation on Duns Scotus—actually Thomas
of Erfurt (Treatise on the Categories of Duns Scotus)—would have led him to
haecceitas, that is toward “this singular other” common to the species, pro-
vided that it itself possesses the principle of individuation that singularizes
it. This is not the case. This text, already in the tradition of Husserl’s Logi-
cal Investigations, on the contrary, turns to the treatment of logic. Here the
promising notion that “what really exists is the individual” is left undevel-
oped.7 (b) Regarding the thingness of the thing then—he could have caught
that which logic had lost. But from the 1936 course on What Is a Thing?
which is essentially concerned with objectivity in Kant, to the 1950 lecture on
The Thing, which is in quest of a new “proximity” between man and beings,
Heidegger never treats this thing that is this rock, this lizard, or this blade of
grass. Instead he is concerned with the thing in the neutrality of being or the
light of the neutral Fourfold in which it is given: the sky, earth, divinities, and
The Singular Other 257
mortals. The lingering of the source in the pouring of the jug says nothing
about this jug or this water or this source, or even of this delay in the act of
pouring—except precisely that the jug (or source) contains everything that it
is not, that is, being or its light.8
Moving to Duns Scotus after Thomas Aquinas requires a double interroga-
tion: (a) first, in haecceitas, in the determination of “this thing” (haec), is there
something that escapes from the neutrality of otherness even to the point of
defining it in its singularity as un-substitutable by all alterity (in the encounter
with Levinas)?; (b) and then, can there be found in such a principle of indi-
viduation that which is separated from such an attachment to the thingness of
the being, which in reality reveals nothing of itself except the very being that
it protects in the ontological difference (in the encounter with Heidegger)?
There will be something to say about the actuality of medieval philosophy (in
the double sense of the actuation of its potentiality and the actualization of its
positions) only at this price. And it is a safe bet that in the following we will
have to make some subtle Scotist distinctions in order to express simultane-
ously man—this Franciscan—who is held a recluse in his own relation to the
world, and my singular humanity which is sought also in the hermeneutic of
a text of which nothing remains if it is not clarified in my context.
A framework ought to be established in order to speak of haecceity, of
“this” (hoc), which makes it the other of every other: such is the task of
contemporary philosophy inasmuch as it tells us something of our relation to
the world. But it turns out that Scotus more than any other was the initiator
of the framework of modernity. For the first time, perhaps, in the history of
philosophy, he opened toward finitude or the “self-enclosed horizon of our
existence.” Disparaged as the destroyer of being (Gilson), or honored for
delimiting the “only possible ontology” (Deleuze), he remains no less the one
through whom either tragedy or salvation comes. He is therefore the frontier
of and for our world, even more than a Descartes or a Kant, both of whom
depended on him more than they were aware. This finitude becomes the com-
mon place of modern philosophy (from Heidegger to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty
to Camus). Here Scotus is the father and we are all his children. Our task is
first to give this “framework of finitude” all the pregnant fullness and consis-
tency that it already has in Scotus himself, then to inscribe there the haecceity
of man and, finally, of angels.
The Framework of Finitude
Saint Paul states it with precision, and we would do well to listen to him: “Do
you not know that then you were without the Messiah . . . without God in
the world” (Eph. 2:12). Without requiring Scotus to make the absurd profes-
sion of atheism (which was meaningless, at any rate, in the Middle Ages),
it may nevertheless be the case that times past have returned: “Atheism is
258 The Other
neither simply nor in the first place a theoretical problem: it is first what is
a priori to existence.”9 So says Jean-Yves Lacoste with precision. The Subtle
Doctor, at least, does not himself adhere to atheism, but nevertheless makes it
conceptualizable precisely when he makes possible the thought, albeit impos-
sible in his opinion, of doing without any theological sphere. It is in this case
to philosophy’s honor, as much as Christianity’s, that they are willing to go
there, not in order to confront an enemy but rather to penetrate to its depths.
The way of univocity, the limitation of nature to our nature and the affirma-
tion of the positivity of contingency thus mark the boundaries, both ancient
and new, in which the haecceity of the “this” will establish itself, even to the
point of overflowing, ultimately, into the new and other order of charity.10
The Way of Univocity

Univocity, and therefore Duns Scotus, inaugurates modernity. A single formula
of Gilles Deleuze is enough to demonstrate this: “There has only ever been one
ontological proposition: Being is univocal. There has only ever been one ontol-
ogy, that of Duns Scotus, which gave being a single voice.”11 What does that
mean? It is beyond the scope of this study to develop the general meaning of
univocity in the Subtle Doctor. Many brilliant commentaries have shown it. It
is sufficient here only to retrace its paths, the very ones that establish univoc-
ity for us today as a result—and at the heart of which haecceity is inscribed.12
The Univocal Concept. The topic of the formulation of the univocity of the
concept of being, the third distinction of the first book of the Ordinatio, is
a warning for us: “I say that God is not only conceived by an analogical
concept [in conceptu analogo] to the concept of the creature, that is, [a con-
cept] which is entirely other [omnino sit alius] than the one that is said of
the creature, but in a certain univocal concept [in conceptu aliquo univoco]
to him and the creature.”13 To say it simply, and because simplicity often has
the merit of clarity despite the inevitability of simplification, to say that God
is both “good” and “not good” or “wise” and “not wise” in the sense that
goodness and wisdom proper to the Creator is excluded from creatures, is
not suitable (analogy). Not that God is not supremely wise, nor that creatures
do not participate in it from a real point of view, but only that he also is logi-
cally submitted to a common concept of being that pertains to him as to the
angel, man, and the rock (univocity).
The argument is clear and is announced in the following paragraph of the
Ordinatio: Even when I doubt whether God is infinite or not, whether there
is one God or many, whether he is created or uncreated, never do I doubt
that I possess a “concept” of this that I doubt: “Every intellect that is certain
of a concept and dubious of man possesses a concept of which it is certain
[habet conceptum de quo est certus] besides the concepts that it doubts.”14
Its proximity with the Cartesian cogito ought not deceive us, even though it
certainly conditions access to it. Scotus is not affirming here that I am certain
of the I who doubts beings, but rather that I possess a definite and univocal
concept of being [étantité] in order to be able to doubt beings [des étants] or
their conceptual determinations. All seems as if—and we consider that this is
always the case for the Subtle Doctor, even including the principle of individ-
uation—a certain logical anteriority must erect itself before all differentiation:
a common and univocal concept of God and creatures makes possible their
differentiation, without which, in reality, they would be identical.
The Stages of Univocity. For the sake of full understanding, I will now retrace
this path of univocity in order then to extract haecceity which stands out
against this community.15 First, the initial and perhaps the most fundamental
proposition of the Ordinatio, which is found in its prologue: “The first natu-
ral object of our intellect is being as being [l’étant en tant qu’étant].”16 Being
as being thus becomes an “object of our intellect”—obiectum intellectus
nostri—and precisely as an object, can be represented and become represent-
able. The metaphysical (but not theological) concept of God and creatures
will henceforth become accessible to our understanding, now without any
negativity. Likewise it will become useless and false to distinguish within the
ens (like Thomas Aquinas some decades earlier) the essence (essentia) and the
act of existence (esse). What was true of God alone, namely, the identifica-
tion of essence and existence, here becomes true of the creature as well: “It is
simply totally false to say that esse is something other than essentia.”17
Whence comes the second thesis: “Being, according to its most common
reason, is the first object of the intellect.”18 A further step is taken here: an
object of the intellect, being is now “under its most common reason”—
secundum suam rationem communissimam. The point made here is critical
because it maintains the univocity on which will be implanted not the equiv-
ocity of beings, but the differentiation of their forms as well as their material
in a unique principle of individuation or singularization (haecceitas). Said
otherwise, Scotus emphasizes that there is no “this” that is not identically a
“that” but to the degree that “there is a common element in the being [est
in re ‘commune’] which is not from itself this one [quod non est de se hoc],
and which by consequence is not reluctant not to be this one [et per conse-
quens ei de se non repugnant non-hoc].”19 In a more trivial fashion, when I
do not even know things in their proper essences (rock, lizard, grass), I still
do not cease to consider that there is something of the thing, or rather, of the
being in its concept, which appears to me and remains irreducible. Hence
it is appropriate to link the common being to the contemporary concept of
the “phenomenon,” at least insofar as it is considered to be the irreducible
appearing of something that appears.20
The third step finally opens the way that leads us to the limitation of
nature and then its contingency as such: this common being, states the
Reportata parisiensa, is “common in itself to perfect and imperfect things
260 The Other
[commune enim est secundum se perfectis et imperfectis].”21 One would have

thought, indeed wrongly if one consults the Thomist analogy alone, that such
a community of nature is given by participation in the divine being, and that
created things, even imperfect, receive a lesser measure of their perfection
that resides in the Creator. But this is not the case. This common concept of
being that precedes all its distinctions and differentiations extends to all, both
to God, understood metaphysically, and to creatures.
Horizontality and Verticality. If we stick only to philosophy, in relation to

which, as we will see later, theology carves out a totally distinct space, hori-
zontality prevails over verticality, or, to say it in the most contemporary terms,
the immanence of concepts and of their significations takes precedence over
the transcendence of their existing content and their perfections. Paradoxi-
cally, common being becomes somehow almost nothing “at all”—and I say
nothing here of that which ordinarily makes the primacy and particularity of
Being. In fact, once esse is identified with essentia every being or every essence
should be able to become this being or this essence (this humanity of Peter
which is distinguished from this humanity of Paul and that of every other
singular). To say it in phenomenological terms—if also according to a the-
matic of alterity which becomes Duns Scotus’s only by the act of “pure love”
in theology—there is no “other me” (ego alter) without posing first an “other
myself” (alter ego). The uniqueness of the genus is here drawn to the extreme,
and nothing first descends to the intellect if not genus itself, which loses its
name to the point of becoming common to the creator and creature. Being
made capable of articulating everything in a common way (ens commune), the
perfect as the imperfect, the better as the worse, being or the originary essence
undifferentiated as object of the intellect does not get lost in the whole since,
starting from this community it succeeds at expressing or formulating that
which is—almost—nothing of this whole that it names (haecceitas).
We ought to see here that it is necessary to go farther (to the common essence
of all beings) in order to get through to that which is closer (to what makes the
singularity of “this being here” distinct from every other being). Here arises
the exigency in Scotus for a necessary limitation of nature to my own nature if
it is the (finally unprovable) case that the singular beings that I experience are
those same ones that constitute my most ordinary being [étantité].
The Limitation of Nature to My Nature

The Hypothesis of a Rupture. The original relation that Scotus establishes
between the natural and supernatural justifies, I suggest, the relevance of his
quest for haecceity. The research into the singular will be revealed in fact to
be all the more grounded as it will be capable of saying something about our
humanity. The prologue of the Ordinatio is clear, and authorizes no detour:
“It is impossible to show by the light of natural reason that something of the
supernatural is present in the wayfarer [nullum supernaturale potest ratione

naturali ostendi inesse viatori], nor is it necessarily required for the perfection
of the latter [nec necessario requiri ad perfectionem eius], nor even does the
one who possesses it know that it is present in him [nec etiam habens potest
cognoscere illud sibi inesse].”22
Let it be clearly understood: Duns Scotus is not denying here that there
is some kind of inscription of the supernatural in the natural; far from it.
A simple repetition of his theory of the imago Dei is enough to make the
point.23 He only indicates—but it is indeed much in regard to the future of
philosophy—that pilgrim man, in the state here below, does not succeed,
starting from his natural reason alone, in showing that the supernatural is
both required (requiri) and present (inesse). Nothing can be built on the old
precept that “all men desire happiness,” says Hannah Arendt—basing herself
on Duns Scotus and carrying out his thought—except, at best, that they have
the “will to suffer.”24 The rupture of metaphysics and the theological there-
fore requires neither the rejection of a natural desire for God in man nor
the exclusion of God as his most natural end, but only the refusal of every
access to him starting from our nature alone: “I admit that God is the natural
end of man [concedo Deum esse finem naturalem hominis],” says Scotus in
the Ordinatio, “but this end is not attained naturally, but rather supernatu-
rally [sed non naturaliter adipiscendum sed supernaturaliter].”25 The interdict
made by philosophy only reinforces the theological. Since the way of nature
is not sufficient to discover or attain the supernatural, “only theology is able
to justify the need for theology”—but not philosophy.26
The Finite as Such. The separation of metaphysics (no access to the supernat-
ural by means of natural reason) on the one side, and theology (the revelation
of the supernatural by the supernatural and it alone) on the other—far from
only excluding him, gives them the gift of their own proper integrity. The
world is all the more the world insofar as it is refused to be allowed to tran-
scend [itself], and revelation is all the more itself as it is self-nourishing. Here
arises the new question proposed by Duns Scotus in relation to the ways of
access to God (Ord. d. 2, q. 1), which is all the more radical as it maintains
nature in its necessary limitation to my own nature in this world: “Why does
not the intellect, the object of which is being [quare intellectus cujus objec-
tum est ens], find repulsive the idea of something infinite [nullam invenit
repugnantiam intelligo aliquod infinitum]?”27
The interrogation is here incisive and patent: even if the natural ought
not to be content by right with the natural, if it is the case that it also holds
the finitude of its sinful failure, why would it not be by the fact of this very
finitude its own and unique good? Independently of the envisaged solution
by the resistance of the will before the limits of our finitude (sin), the breach
is open by the very posing of the question. For the first time in the history
of philosophy—and it is not any less established from the moment that one
262 The Other
considers the anteriority of Scotus to Kant and of course to Heidegger—the

finite is not left to be thought here by opposition to and delimitation of the
infinite. Nothing else is given to man but such a limitation of nature to his
own present state—somehow always plugged up by the horizon of its fini-
tude. And “if one were to argue starting from these things which are objects
of faith [ex creditis],” adds Scotus in the prologue, “reasoning does not strike
against the Philosopher [non est ratio contra philosophum] since he does not
admit as a premise the object of faith.”28 It is therefore not an understatement
to see in Duns Scotus the figure of a Scholastic philosopher “so strangely
contemporary to our most urgent questionings.”29
The Horizon of Finitude. This limitation of nature to my nature, at least

in my radical incapacity to transcend it by my intelligence alone, in no way
moves us away from haecceity. On the contrary, it leads us to it, here not by
means of the community of being (univocity) but by reduction to our own
humanity (finitude). Our impossible access to the supernatural will require
that we consult only our own nature. Not yet blessed, let alone God himself,
the proper “this” which makes the thing as though other to every other will
designate for us first the nearest “this” (haec) of this rock or this man made
in our finitude, rather than the “that,” farther away, of this angel or this God
given only in his self-revelation. The obscurity of the apprehension of the
singular, as we can experience it today, will be measured by the density of our
singularity taken here below in the positivity of our contingency.
The Positivity of Contingency

A repetition of the entire Scotist theory of creation, fall, and redemption is
necessary in order to gauge our experience of such a limitation of our intel-
lection, which is in reality all the more powerful as we ignore it. Such will not
however be our task here, since it would bypass for the most part the fixed
boundaries of this final chapter. However, (a) an ontological reason, (b) a
metaphysical motif, and (c) a theological argument together allow the think-
ing of a real positivity of contingency in Scotus, a thinking of the sort that
what will be the most appropriate or singular will not necessarily at the same
time break the seal of failure or sin.
The Mode of Contingency. (a) First from the ontological point of view, that is,
of the structure of the world, Duns Scotus sometimes formulates statements
of a surprising modernity: “I say that contingency is not merely a privation
or a defect of Being like the deformity . . . which is sin. Rather, contingency
is a positive mode of Being, just as necessity is another mode.”30 Everything
depends on what we understand contingency to be: either the possibility of
the choice of contraries in liberty, or the structure of the world as such. But
one does not go without the other—and, in a word, it is to be faithful to the
principle of prudence in Aristotle to indicate that there is never either deliber-

ation or decision without the positivity of a world itself capable of mutability
and change.31 What is conformed to Aristotelianism—the pure respect of a
contingency not first derived from some kind of human failure—is nonethe-
less highly original in the context of Christianity in regard to sin.
The Expansion of Man to God. (b) From here comes the second innovation:
metaphysics, at least in its collision with revealed theology, and which now
breaks definitively with the Greek context. The sphere of contingency extends
now from man to God. Precisely where human contingency is typically opposed
to divine necessity—whether, for example, the superlunary world (Aristotle),
“reasons of fittingness” (Augustine), or “necessary reasons” (Anselm)—Duns
Scotus surprisingly states in the prologue to the Lectura: “The main part of
theology is concerned with contingent truths [de contingentibus]: the incarna-
tion, the creation of the world by three persons, that man will be beatified by
the divine essence—these are all truly contingent truths, whereas the engen-
dering of the Son by God the Father is an eternal truth.”32
The incarnation, the creation, and beatification are therefore of the order
of divine contingency in the sense of a free decision of God ad extra (deciding,
that is, on their being or non-being), while the engendering of the Son by the
Father pertains to the order of necessary truths since it is directly demanded
by his nature ad intra (it must be). The extension of contingency to God all
the more enlarges the sphere of his freedom as it also seems to articulate,
through univocity, beings in their pure haecceity. The fact that “I love God”
(me diligere Deum) or that “God loves me,” says Scotus in the prologue to
the Lectura, is of the same kind of contingency as the “falling rock” (lapidem
descendere). Even as it is always identically repeated, the rock that continu-
ally falls again and again remains in fact no less an ever new event (novum),
at least in view of all the circumstances that could prevent its fall (the pres-
ence of another object or a cement that holds it fast). Such is the case, then,
by analogy, of the love of God for me as of my love for him. Given to each
other in pure “gratuity,” what is true of the rock (its fall) is even truer of man
and God (their reciprocal love), since the freedom of the latter overflows sig-
nificantly the apparent necessity of the first. The seal of freedom thus marks
everything of the order of haecceity (this rock that is falling or this man who
is loving) to the point of making the contingency of each being (being capable
of falling or not, or loving or not) the very principle of its singularization.33
We can find there the most contemporary requisites, which once again show
that Duns Scotus opens the path of our own modernity: “Individual existence
of every sort is, quite universally speaking, ‘contingent’ [zufallig],” Husserl
emphasizes in Ideas I, whereas Jean-Luc Marion will define contingency ety-
mologically in Being Given as “that which touches me,” or which “affects
me” (contingit) in the sense, precisely, that nothing that is singular could be
considered unable to come to me or “fall on me.”34
264 The Other
Incarnation by Glorification. (c) The last reason is a purely theological motif

in the economy of redemption. It gives to the world all of its positivity and
therefore to haecceity all the density of its singularity. The formula of Duns
Scotus in the Reportata parisiensa is known but no less remarkable: “if no
angel or man had fallen [si nec fuisset Angelus lapsus nec homo], Christ
would still have been predestined [to be incarnate] [adhuc fuisset Christus
sic praedestinatus], even if no other being but Christ had been created.”35 We
rediscover here the phenomenological motif of the incarnation that first came
to light in our study of Irenaeus. Here, as in Irenaeus, the incarnation does
not bear a direct relation to sin, but instead, for Scotus, God becomes man,
not primarily for the sake of reparation or satisfaction, but through the pure
glorification and manifestation of the Father in the Son, and of man, then,
in his beatitude. Finitude is therefore not first marked by a failure, since that
is not first the cause of its assumption by the Word. The sin of Adam marks,
to be sure, a delay in glorification, but it is not the sole cause of reparation:
“If Adam had not sinned [nisi aliquis prius peccasset],” adds Scotus, “Christ
whole and entire would have been immediately glorified [statim fuisset totus
Christus glorificatus].”36
A conclusion therefore imposes itself, inherited from Avicenna but articu-
lated by Scotus himself: “Let those who deny contingency be tortured until
they admit that it is possible not to be tortured.”37 The usual primacy of neces-
sity over contingency is here suddenly reversed, counteracting virtually every
trace of Hellenism in revelation: contingency (a) first as a structure of the
world having a real positivity in order to justify its consistency and an abso-
lute freedom for man; (b) then extended to God, making of his works ad extra
(incarnation, creation, beatification) acts of an absolute freedom over-against
any “necessary reason;” (c) and finally, related to Christ, unfolding all of his
density in a salvation primarily operated for the sake of glorification, rather
than satisfaction or reparation. At this point virtually everything is said about
haecceity, even if it was always ever only an implicit question. If there is singu-
larity—of essence and existence since these are identified with one another for
Scotus—it only has meaning for me if it concerns me and therefore transforms
me. In this case then the “quid” or “what-ness of the thing [Ding]” can be
transmuted into a “haec” or “this” of the thing [de l’affaire] (Sache) in order
that the haecceity of singularity is drawn from the univocity of the entity.
Singular Man
I have already emphasized that for Duns Scotus it is necessary to reach the
farthest (the univocity of the concept of being) in order to rejoin the closest
(the haecceity of the singular). What is true of the passage from univocity to
haecceity is even truer of the haecceity of beings themselves—for the angels
in particular, who again make their appearance here. In his treatise on the
angels (Ord., II, d. 3, p. 1) the Subtle Doctor resolves the question of the
“distinction of angels into persons” by suggesting that it is necessary “to
begin by inquiring about the distinction of material substances into individu-
als [de distinctione individuali in substantiis materialibus].”38 Existentially
closer to the more concrete (the rock or the man) in order to reflect on the
most abstract (the angel), Scotus privileges (at least in the order of the text)
the haecceity of the contingency that is closest to us in its determinations
(the haecceity of the rock for me) in relation to the brilliance of its shining
in the most distant (the direct intuition of singulars for the angels). A new
reversal of the field of metaphysics is enacted here, for the primacy of the
singular over the universal is established (on top of the reversal enacted by
the primacy of contingency over necessity): “The individual bears a certain
perfection that the common does not [individuum includit aliquem perfectio-
nem quam non includit commune].”39
Before Scotus everyone thought that the epistemological primacy of the
universal over the singular, or the common over the individual, was self-
evident. It was therefore left completely uninterrogated. Whether Plato’s
“exemplary forms” or Aristotle’s “universal concepts” drawn by induction
from the particular, there was never a “science but of the universal.”40 But the
primacy established by Scotus is not first ontological, like the superiority of
the first substance maintained by the Stagirite (“the individual man” or “the
individual horse”) over the second substance (“man and animal”).41 To the
contrary, the individual (individuum) defeats “in perfection” the common
(commune), not simply in its being, but in its epistemological principle or
concept: “The concept of this essence under the reason of being [conceptus
illius essentiae sub ratione entis] is more imperfect than the concept of this
essence as it is this essence here [ut haec essentia est].”42
The question is therefore not only ontological, residing in the Scotist refusal
of the distinction between essence and existence. On the contrary, it is in the
first place epistemological, in the sense that it challenges the primacy of the
universal over the singular left previously unquestioned in the order of knowl-
edge. So the Subtle Doctor asks in essence if it could be the case that man has
knowledge of singulars, or at least that knowledge of singulars is better than
the apprehension of the universal, which is still inaccessible to him in his state
as wayfarer. The case of the rock, the man, and the angel will thus serve as the
main thread woven through an investigation that has no other end than of
delimiting, on the one hand, haecceity in relation to univocity (the paradigm of
the rock) and of extracting, on the other hand, the kind of singularity proper
to man (found in between the modes of haecceity of the rock and the angel).
The Case of the Rock or the Cause of Singularity

A Sufficient Reason. Is univocity consequently necessary for differentiation,
and even for singularity in order to assure its haecceity? “Positing community
266 The Other
in nature itself” (posita communitate in ipsa natura), responds the Ordinatio,

“it is necessary to find a cause of singularity [causam singularitatis] that adds
[superaddit] something to the nature of the singular being.”43
The impossible individuations of singular being either through matter
(Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas), quantity (Gilles of Rome and Godfrey of Fon-
taines), or double negation (Henry of Ghent), are too well known to repeat.44
The key point is that even for Scotus one must “add” (superaddit) something
(a cause) to the nature of the singular being in order to make it truly singular.
Not that nature is the singular being, since every empirical view is sufficient
to show it (some such rock is not some other rock), but in the sense that a
cause (causa) ought to justify it, much like the future idea of “sufficient reason
(Leibniz), though the principle is reserved here to haecceity alone (why is this
rock some such rock and not another one or otherwise?). Here I point out
again the role of a treatise on the angels (Ord., II, d. 3, p. 1)—“again” since
already the angelology of Thomas has already done the work of convincing
us of the pertinence of Scholastic angelology for clarifying the contemporary
question of alterity. Here it is made a formal rule: “In things, independently
of every operation of the intellect, there is a certain unity [aliqua unitas]
which is inferior to numerical unity [minor unitate numerali], in other words
the unity proper to singularity [sive unitate propria singularis], and which is
nevertheless real [realis].”45
Almost everything is contained in this unique statement: “the cause of sin-
gularity” (causa singularitatis) is found in an autonomous principle of unity,
anterior to every numerical, material, quantitative, qualitative, or existential
determination, and which makes this being to be precisely this nature. This
is called the “unity proper to singularity” (unitate propria singularis). In the
next section, we will examine this first negatively, then positively.
The Unity Proper to the Singular. Negatively, and picking up again a

famous paradigm inherited from the Stagirite, what makes “Socrates him-
self” is neither his material (size, morphology, weight, etc.), nor his form
(his membership in humanity in general), nor even his difference with the
man Plato: “Not being something does not explain what something is.”46
Accusing Dionysian apophatic theology of getting lost in the haze of an all
too neutral conception of the universality of God—“I intensely hate nega-
tions [negationes etiam non summe amamus]”47—Scotus will demand that
haecceity designate a positive principle, a “cause of singularity,” by which
it determines the essence to exist particularly, not in the sense of matter-
ing to any other in general, and always replaceable by a new other, albeit
irreducible to the sphere of the same (Levinas), but rather as such a particu-
lar other all the more un-substitutable as it is named positively such, and
not by comparison with other beings that inhabit the same space: “Mate-
rial substance,” says the Subtle Doctor, “is individuated [sit individua] by
a positive entity [per aliquam entitatem postitivam] that through itself
determines the nature to singularity [per se determinantem naturam ad

singularitatem].”48
Positively, a common form (the human soul) and a common material
(the human body) are sufficient to compose a human quiddity (a being
corresponding to this definition). But in order for there to be a human indi-
viduality (Socrates), the composition, itself individual, of an individual form
(“this human soul” of Socrates) and an individual material (“this human
body” of Socrates) is required. Here lies Scotus’s originality. Socrates is not
Socrates merely by means of the composition of a human soul and body,
but by his individual manner of making up his soul and his body. Haecceity
first attains neither the soul (form), nor the body (matter), nor the unity of
the two (the composite), but the collection of what is given (form, matter,
composite) as it originally holds the principle of this entire essence produced
by God: “inferior to numerical unity” (minor unitate numerali), as indicated
above, within the meaning of the most original anteriority.49 What makes
“Socrates Socrates” does not come in the first place from his difference
with another, or from his components or his composite (matter-form), but
rather, as has been rather poorly formulated though not without pedagogi-
cal value, from his “Socratesness”—that is, from his own particular way of
expressing his essence or his humanity as body and soul, both singularized
in their respective essences and in the composite itself.50 Said in a more con-
temporary idiom, though far removed from Scotus, at least in terminology:
the person of Socrates (his way of uniting his body and his own soul) per-
forms his humanity (being the particular man Socrates) and his humanity
(participating in the genre or the species of humanity in general) does not
make his person (being Socrates). Against the Stagirite, there is for Socrates
some kind of definition: not in his universality (humanity) but precisely as
he alone defines a type of universal individuated by itself and through itself
alone, and by which his essence appears—his “Socratesness.” Gilson trans-
lates this idea judiciously with the following formula: “It is a matter here
of an individuation of the quiddity, but not by the quiddity” (at least the
premises of this were already discovered in Aristotle; see Metaphysics, Book
Lambda, 5).51
The Homogenization of Individuation. From the philosophical point of

view, though in anticipation of a theological guardianship of the distinction
of persons, that which is true of the haecceity of Socrates is true of every
being for Scotus. What is true of man, because at first glance more obvious
for us, is also and in the first place true of this rock as this most ordinary
being, which is also singularized in its form: “I hold that if this rock [huic
lapidi] is not left to be divided into subjective parts, it must necessarily be by
reason of something positive intrinsic to it [per aliquid positivum intrinse-
cum]. I term this something positive self-caused individuation [per se causa
individuationis].”52
268 The Other
It would be wrong to complain here about some kind of homogenization

of the individuation of man with the haecceity of the rock. On the contrary,
by pure respect for contingency, as we have seen above (and in order to
remain at the level of what is given by nature to my nature), the principle of
individuation first touches the collection of beings—and for me the priority
is those who are the closest to me, including myself. From a didactic point of
view (that is, God’s), even haecceity would be true first of the divine essence
and then of angels, men, and rocks; from a heuristic point of view (my own),
it is first about this rock or this lizard rather than this angel or this God.
A question still remains and catches back up with our second interroga-
tion: once the haecceity of this rock is determined starting from its “internal
cause” by which its essence itself is singularized, how then do we pass from
the simple singularity of singular beings to the unicity of this singular being
that is this man Socrates, standing between the thingness of the rock and the
immateriality of the angel?
The Case of Man or the Call of the Name

Two reasons, one philosophical, the other theological, suggest that we should
not consider the humanity of this man Socrates in the same way that we
approach this stone by the wayside or this blade of grass in the meadow. In
his treatise on the angels, which examines the principle of individuation, Sco-
tus says: “Not only faith [secundum fidem] but also philosophy [secundum
philosophiam] obliges us to consider that each man has his own intellec-
tive soul [aliam et aliam animam intellectivam].”53 Faith and philosophy
are therefore the two points of view from which to envisage the singularity
proper to man, that is, of “every man.”
Against the Common Intellect (Averroes). (a) First, the philosophical point
of view: the argument is carried out against that “accursed Averroes [illus
maledicti Averrois] who imagined that there exists a single intellect for all
men [de unitate intellectus in omnibus].”54 For the Subtle Doctor—whose
subtlety is in danger of being reduced to scorn here—it is certainly not essen-
tial to conform to the Aristotelian program for which man is distinguished,
according to his species, from animals and vegetative life by means of his
intellective soul. The famous and complex debate about the common intellect
finds in haecceity its most profound objection. What makes humanity human
in fact is not the intellective soul as such, according to a purely formal divi-
sion, but the act of considering “each man” as having “his own intellective
soul” (aliam et aliam animam intellectivam). Men neither share nor divide
up a single intellect, no more than the rock is individuated by its quantity
or extension. But each man, on the contrary, “enacts his intellectuality or
humanity”—in the same way that he once “enacted his humanity” by real-
izing through himself human tasks—since he differentiates it and singularizes
it in its own beingness. Socrates and Plato do not share a common intellect,
but each are, by their own intellect, beings or essences capable of singular-
izing their own humanity.
Singularization through Being (Moses). (b) The theological point of view:

here haecceity finds in God and for man its true motive. (i) In the name
of God revealed to Moses; (ii) in the determination of the singular other
through love in Saint John.
(i) The address of Yahweh to Moses first marks for Scotus in the Treatise
on First Principles an attempt to reach God through the concepts that man
knows are accessible to his humanity here below—namely, univocal being:
“Lord our God, to Moses your servant who sought to know from you, the
most true master, by which name he ought to call you before the children of
Israel, seeking thereby what the intelligence of mortals could conceive of you,
you have responded by revealing your true and blessed name: I am the one
who is [ego sum qui sum]. You are the true being [verum esse], you are being
whole and entire . . . Help me, Lord, to know what our natural reason can
attain in taking as a point of departure the being [ens] that you have attrib-
uted to yourself.”55
The “metaphysics of exodus” (Gilson) or “project of ontotheology” (Vig-
naux) seems to be totally contained here in the context of this demonstration
of the “First Principle” for a metaphysical determination of God starting
from God himself, who somehow condescends to man, not necessarily in
order to reveal to him his own name, but rather what is comprehensible to
humanity: esse is reduced to ens commune.56 But against every metaphysics
or ontotheology, there is, it seems to me, more to this name than the simple
declaration by God of that which man can comprehend. “He who is,” for
Scotus, only tells us positively that he “is” in his universality (esse) only if he
remains negatively inaccessible to us in his singularity: Ego sum qui sum—“I
am This One [hic] who I am.”57 The name of being ascribed to God by vir-
tue of his accessibility to man shows therefore a defect of metaphysics (as
opposed to establishing it). The proper name of God, following the Jewish
tradition (YHWH), remains completely unsayable—not because of its gran-
deur or universality, but by its singularity and haecceity: “In God,” states the
prologue to the Ordinatio, “the first subject of all theology in itself is the
divine essence insofar as it is ‘this one here’ [essentia ut haec].”58
At least in the “theology that God knows” (theologia divina)—but not
man, as we will see below—the “essentia ut haec” also denotes the nature and
proper name of God as singularity, inaccessible to us here below but making
up his true being in the beyond. Aristotle already affirmed that the “state of
joy that we possess only fleetingly but that God possesses constantly” does
not come from his immateriality but his singularity.59 What accounts for the
response of God to Moses, according to Scotus, is therefore not, except by
default, the univocity of his being with every being—“I am the one who
270 The Other
is”—but, on the contrary the singular appellation of himself through himself

as the self-existent [innascible] source of every possible singularity: “I am the
One who is.” Far from being and close to the Name—such is the novelty of
the Scotist interpretation of the formula addressed to Moses (Ex. 3:14), by
the singularity of “the One [Celui]” rather than the requisite of Being, by the
call of the name rather than by the metaphysics of Exodus.60
Singularization through Charity (Saint John). (ii) The determination of the

singular other by charity is also sustained completely in the Scotist call, man
directly addressed by God, making him exist in his singularity at the same
time as God conceives man starting from his own singularity: Amo, volo ut
sis—“I love you, I will that you be.”61
The first meaning to attribute to the formula is that “love gives being”
(I love you/you are).62 But there is more to this in the thought of Scotus,
who escapes precisely from the double neutrality of alterity (Levinas) and
ontology (Heidegger). Only the singularity of the one who gives or rather “is
given” since he is love itself (“I love you”), conferring being to this singular
being that he desires even in his essence (“. . . you are”)—Socrates rather than
Plato, or better, Peter, builder of his church (Mt. 16:18) rather than Judas the
betrayer (Jn. 13:30). To be and to be individuated by love (I love you/you are)
is, for Scotus, not to exist or to be actualized, but to respond to the call of
one’s own essence, ever determined by the One who “is charity [agapê estin]”
(1 Jn. 4:8), and who wants me for me (Jer. 1:5).63 The singularization by love
will thus extend, as I will now show, from the love of the other by God to the
love of God by the other and from the love of God by the other to the love
of the other by me, who is also in the image of God.
Pure Love
God’s Love of the Other. Contrary to a stereotype widespread even among
the best exegetes of Scotus, the “love of the other by God” principally aims
for the other and not, in some kind of divine quasi-self-sufficiency, for God
himself. The pure love (amor purus) by which God loves man is not a reflexive
love turned on itself in a sort of auto-contemplation of the Aristotelian type.
He loves man only in a free and gratuitous fashion without expectation of
return. The “love of justice” (amor justitiae) excludes any love of profit. God
does not love in the mode of possession—whether loving himself (sibi) or me
(mihi). No reciprocity can explain his love for me, since he never ceased loving
me, even when I stopped loving him: “God is not the object of his own charity
[Deus non est objectum caritatis suae],” says Scotus in the Reportata parisien-
sia, “since he understands the good as my good [ut incluendo quod est bonum
mihi] or he understands it as his own good [nec incluendo ut bonum sibi].”64
So God does not love man in order for man to render him glory, but on the
contrary, he loves man for the sake of man and in order first that man himself
loves from the glory by which God loves him and thus loves himself: “I regret
having to say,” says Camille Bérubé, remarking on Léon Veuthey and some
of the other best interpreters of Scotus, “that this metaphysics of the love of
God as the final cause of itself is neither Scotist nor Thomist, for nothing is
the final cause of its being . . . By creating them God wants other creatures
than himself to have a pure, disinterested love in themselves, like God has of
himself, so that they will finally arrive at the goodness of the beatific vision. It
is not in order to satisfy a need to be loved, but by a pure liberality.”65
The Other’s Love of God

The counterpart on the side of the other is thus imposed: the “love of God by
the other”—and not uniquely the “love of the other by God”—is not built
on any kind of reciprocity. The other loves God, not so that God will love
him—trapped in an exchange, but first in order to learn from him how to
love oneself, as well as the other and God, in the same purely disinterested
way that God loves: “The principal reason of what is lovable in relation to
the will is not that it is good for me [mihi], for you [tibi] or even for him [nec
etiam sibi] . . . This is why the first and most perfect reason which makes
God lovable is his absolute goodness [absoluta bonitas sua], as he is good in
himself, for he loves and is loved in a love of justice [amor justitiae].”66
A triple reduction or “bracketing” (resuming, here, the development of the
phenomenological epochê by Eckhart—of myself (mihi), the other (tibi), and
God (sibi) leads us to consider disinterested love, or the “love of justice,” that
which is loved by God and which ought to be loved by my loving God. The
absolute goodness of God merits my love because by it I resemble him in this
purely liberal way of loving.
My Love of the Other. The “love of the other by me” will thus pass in an
ultimate way through God in order to receive from him the gratuity of love.
I will myself love the other only in a unique way when I desire myself also, in
a purely disinterested way as the image of the disinterested God, as he him-
self loves, loving God and myself in a disinterested way: “Thus loving God
I love myself [diligo me] and I love my neighbor [et proximum], desiring for
myself and him the love of God [ex caritate volendo mihi et sibi velle] and by
this love the possession of God in himself [et per dilectionem habere Deum
in se].”67 I can therefore desire for you your own desire for God in the sense
that I desire that you also can live by participating in the pure love by which
God loves and also calls me to love myself: “I desire God [volo Deum] and
I want you to desire God [volo te velle Deum], and in this way I love you
out of charity [ex caritate] because I want for you [tibi] the good of justice
[bonum justitiae].”68
The love of the other by God, love of God by the other, and love of the other
by me (in the image of God) are together fed by the same disinterestedness.
272 The Other
“Paradoxically” I love the other all the more as I do not love that he loves me,
or rather I only love him for what he is—as a possible and probable future
lover of God, independently of all of my personal interests, even against
them: “To love God by a love of charity,” we find subtly expressed in the
Ordinatio, “means to desire the object in itself [secundum se] even if, impos-
sibly [etiamsi per impossibile] he did not respond to the good of the one who
loves [circumscriberetur ab eo commoditas ejus ad amantem].”69
In some sense God is looking for “friends to love” or some others to love
with him—“vult alios habere condilentes”—not for himself, for liberal love
is his very nature (which has been termed “love donation”), even to the point
of giving the donation of the gift itself.70 Co-loving with us, the Subtle Doctor
extends condilectio to man (that is, the “love of a third”), which, in Richard
of Saint Victor, is reserved to the Spirit alone. In the same way that in Richard
the Spirit does not loathe, but even desires that the Son be loved much, even
more by the Father than himself, so also ought I not be reluctant to desire
that my neighbor be much and even more loved by God than myself. In other
words, man is integrated in his heart to the perichoresis of the Trinity, and the
glory of God is full not of the praise of the self for the self, but of the glory
of the other for the other by which man himself loves in this same (pure) love
by which God loves.71
Singular Angel
The Theological Motif

The Intention of God. Passing from the singularity of man to the singularity
of the angel, the true reason of haecceity—mine and the other’s, if it is true
that there was something learned from the nature of angels—seemed to be
more directly theological than philosophical, of the order of faith rather than
of reason. In Christianity intentions (intentiones) can certainly be ascribed to
God, but these intend first the singularization of the individual (angels and
men) and not the obeisance to a law in community (a people). God under-
stood as Trinity does not desire merely such or such act, or even such or such
disposition of the heart, albeit operated for love of him. He first wants me
in my pure ipseity: “Peter, James, and John,” thus recounting the specific dis-
ciples Christ took aside (Mt. 14:33). The ego engendered by the community
(Origen) and constituted by subjectivity (Aquinas) is now articulated in a
haecceity required by the context of faith (Scotus). The case of the angel thus
serves in a new way as the paradigm of alterity, but here, specifically, in the
quest for an identified singularity: “Of all the most principal entities [in prin-
cipalissimis entibus],” Scotus says circumspectly in his Treatise on the Angels,
“the individual [individuum] corresponds the most to the intention of God
[est a Deo principaliter intentum].”72
From the Singular to Singulars. The distinction of the philosophical and

theological orders still does not justify treating of one (metaphysics) and dis-
pensing with the other (charity). We can only regret the numerous analyses
of Scotus that think they can treat of haecceity in a unilaterally philosophical
fashion.73 Not that there is no singularity outside of the theological and the
vision of God—far from it in fact—but only that the pursuit of a “cause of
singularity” (causam singularitatis) finds its full accomplishment only in God
who contains singularly the essence of every singular being as well as their
most proper names: from some particular rock on the wayside (passed with-
out even being seen), to some particular angel (Gabriel) sent to the Mother of
God to announce her blessed mission (Lk. 1:26). The movement is not from
the universal to the singular in the Subtle Doctor’s highly theological perspec-
tive, but rather from the Singular to singulars, so that individuality becomes
the ultimate realitas entis—“the ultimate reality of being”—and so that the
universal becomes, as if by excess, relegated to the realm of pure abstraction
in the nominalism of William of Ockham.74
The Act of Love. The rational creature loves God not only for himself and for
its own creaturely sake, but it loves this neighbor for God’s sake—“wanting
for itself and the neighbor the love of God”—for such a love alone singular-
izes both of them in a call to be their own essence, as it does even for me in
my own essence: “The entire theology of Scotus,” says Gilson, “is marked by
this truly capital thesis, that the first free act encountered in the collection
of being is an act of love.”75 Theologically I receive my haecceity from God
who is Haecceity itself, as well as the desire for the other to receive his own
haecceity from God. In its spiritual and Franciscan roots, haecceity, from the
point of view of love, is “the philosophical expression of what St. Francis
wanted to say when he said ‘Brother’ ”:76 not only because philosophically
every man is distinguished from every other being by his own intellect, but
first theologically because he receives, for himself and for the other, this haec-
ceity of God himself as pure singularity who singularizes him and confers on
him his unique beauty. Thus it is “the implacable logic of Scotism to stress
more than any other system the unique and singular character of the beauty
of the individual. The Scotist aesthetic is one of ‘this’ and ‘that,’ in other
words an aesthetic of haecceity: it is therefore parallel to the increasing indi-
vidualization of art.”77
The Case of the Angel or the Irreducible Obscurity

The Privilege of the Blessed. A double call—God to me and me to the other
for God—therefore constitutes the theological singularity of man, entirely
turned by his free will toward this Singularity that summons him. But is it
fitting for us, in our present state (pro statu isto) to claim the angelic condi-
tion for which this haecceity seems explicitly established? Should we forget
274 The Other
our starting point in the unsurpassable context of finitude in which the haec-
ceity of “this” is inscribed for us? The essential, in Scotus, is not in fact the
evident and necessary singularization of angels into proper individualities (as
opposed to unique species, contra Aquinas). Although implicit, the question
of our knowledge of this Singularity that is God (thus divesting us of the
knowledge of both the angels and the blessed) is of no less critical impor-
tance: “In God and for the blessed, the first subject of all theology in itself
[theologia in se] is the divine essence as just this one [est essentia ut haec].”78
Our Theology. Theology “in itself” (in se) or “enjoyed by God” (divina), as
I have already, but only made mention, is distinguished from “our” theology
(theologia nostra) or that “enjoyed by man” (theologia tradita). In fact, the
first knows, in the beatific vision, the essence of God “as just this one” (ut
haec), that is, in his proper nature and singularity. By contrast, our theology,
attached to our finitude here below, attains through the mediation of scrip-
ture only “this essence” of God (haec essentia Dei), that is, as determined
not properly and positively in his singularity, but in a derivative and negative
fashion, such that I can conceive his essence starting from its distinction with
other essences.79 Said otherwise (and in spite of the subtlety of the argument
here), the impossible apprehension, in my state as wayfarer, of the singular-
ity of the One who is singularity itself means that such a haecceity remains
at least invisible and invisable starting from my own finitude:80 “Not the
sun, but the eye of the owl explains why it does not see the sun.”81 Against
a strange defect of our nature here below which always prefers universality
to singularity, paradoxically my human being-there will sometimes be satis-
fied with the universal, less because of a lack of amazement at the “essentia
ut haec” than because of my incapacity to receive it: “The intellect . . . has
recourse to universal concepts precisely because it is incapable of knowing
haecceity.”82
A Certain Happiness in Misery. However, there is a certain happiness at the

heart of this misery. In my state of peregrination, having no direct access (a)
to the singularity of God, (b) to myself, (c) or to the other, will in fact be the
most certain proof of their unfathomable mystery here below. (a) Regard-
ing God, the human intellect differs from the angelic intellect in that it does
not have an immediate apprehension of singularity: “The angelic intellect,”
notes Scotus, “directly knows the singular. Our intellect does not know it
in that way.”83 The impossible transgression of our finitude, at least in the
present state (hic et nunc) demands that we remain human—even though
we are entitled to aspire to our own beatification. (b) From here comes the
fact that “our soul does not know itself by means of its essence.”84 We will
know “singulars in their own reasons in the fatherland [in patria] . . . but in
the present state [sed pro statu ipso] our intellect knows nothing but what
can be produced by an image.”85 In a word, therefore, we only have access
to ourselves by means of “representations.” And what we apprehend of our-

selves here below is not our own haecceity, but only the accidents, or at least
images of our most proper being. (c) This is why, from the point of view of
the other, according to a felicitous isomorphism that appeared in the later
works of Ricoeur, “the soul knows itself as others” (anima intelligit se sicut
alia)—“soi-même comme un autre” [oneself as another]—as Aristotle argues
“that it thinks only moved by phantasms [mota a phantasmatibus].”86 The
singular other—an appropriate name for every being but especially of the
other man—is given to me like myself, appearing first and most often in
his accidentality rather than in his haecceity: the face, nose, or color of the
other’s eyes (accidents) tell me nothing about his proper humanity as he sin-
gularizes it as a “this” (haec). Therefore in the present state, in fact if not by
right, “the soul cannot think itself before having thought what is other to it”
(Boulnois).87
Desiring the Singular

Enjoying the Singularity. But the Subtle Doctor does not despair as he
remains in the philosophical sphere of contingency. To know the singular
indirectly is not to pass it by completely. On the contrary—and here we have
perhaps reached the fine point of Scotist haecceity—what I do not know of
singularity intellectually, I experience by a pure motion of my will. The pri-
macy of the will over the intellect, though subsuming it more than negating
it, makes singularity for us here below the place of an experience or a plea-
sure, rather than a knowledge and a vision of essence: “It is not necessary to
conclude that singularity, as condition of the object, is not known because
the mode of expression of the singular is indirect,” notes Camille Bérubé. “It
is expressed in a universal concept but the intellect no less knows that this
object enjoys singularity, that it is endowed with unity and incommensurabil-
ity.”88 Without fully grasping the haecceity of the other, I understand, without
truly arriving there, at least that it lives and experiences like me its own haec-
ceity. The exception of course is God’s grasp of himself. And such another
will envisage me as some such particular other, though not in the sense that
along with him I would ever renounce being such—but only to know me and
him as such, that is, in the fullness of haecceity, by way of God who alone
(creatively) knows us as such.
Contingency at All Costs. Against William of Ockham, Scotus refuses in

advance to affirm, on the one hand, that “the first known in the order of time
is the singular,” and, on the other hand, that “the first clearly known can be
the singular.”89 Certainly Ockham does not fulfill the work of Scotus (as is
sometimes thought) by handing over to man what the latter refused to give
him: the immediate knowledge of singulars. On the contrary, Ockham trans-
forms him, at the cost of surpassing the horizon of finitude. The consequence
276 The Other
of this move remains to be assessed. For in order, with William of Ockham,

“to combat the old idea that the singular is ineffable” (P. Alféri), it would be
necessary beforehand either to provide man with such an access to the inef-
fable world, or to hold that such an ineffability belongs to the mundane and
that we possess the key to it. The transparency of singulars in the Venerable
Doctor pays the price, therefore, of the disappearance of the weight of their
contingency that the Subtle Doctor maintained.90
A Blessed Opacity. A (blessed?) opacity remains between me and myself, the

other and God in Scotus and thus makes of this haecceity, however impene-
trable, the ultima realitas entis, “the ultimate reality of being.” Never reduced
to pure transparency and yet constitutive of all reality, Scotist haecceity in its
impenetrable obscurity—at least for us here below—joins up together with
a number of the most contemporary approaches, especially, for example, in
Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “If we succeed in describing the access to the things
themselves,” we find in his posthumous The Visible and the Invisible (1964),
“it will only be through this opacity and this depth, which never cease: there
is no thing fully observable, no inspection of the thing that would be without
gaps and that would be total; we do not wait until we observe it in order to
say that the thing is there; on the contrary, it is the appearance it has of being
a thing that convinces us immediately that it is possible to observe it. In the
grain of the sensible we find the assurance for a series of cross-checkings,
which do not constitute the ecceity [sic] of the thing, but are derived from
it.”91
The singular other—myself, some such particular being, the other, and
God—always remains impenetrable by the very fact of its singularization.
That which ought to be the failure of man (the impenetrability of singularity,
but his pleasure nevertheless) actually signals his greatest success: to be and
remain man, and not completely in the light of God beyond or totally capable
of him in his state here below. As Pascal said: “Man is neither angel nor beast,
and the misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the beast.”92
In his quasi-Franciscan love for the singularity of the sensible, Gerard Man-
ley Hopkins also understood the importance of haecceity, as necessary in
its variety as it is multilayered and strange. If not the cause, his reading of
Scotus was at least the sign: “At this time I had first begun to get hold of the
copy of Scotus on the Sentences in the Baddely library and was flush with a
new stroke of enthusiasm. It may come to nothing or it may be a mercy from
God. But just then when I took in any inscape of the sky or sea I thought of
Scotus.”93 This “inscape” or “haecceity” which at this point for Hopkins may
have come to nothing, in reality leads to everything, at least according to the
course that we have taken in this book: (I) it leads wholly to God, precisely
where the “tension of metaphysics and theology” (Augustine) leads to the
“God phenomenon” (Erigena) and then to the “suspension” of everything

including oneself (Eckhart); (II) it leads wholly to the flesh when its “vis-
ibility” (Irenaeus) also produces its “solidity” (Tertullian) and “conversion”
(Bonaventure); (III) it leads, finally, wholly to the other, when the alterity
engendered starting from “community” (Origen) is constituted by true inter-
subjectivity (Aquinas) and simultaneously specifies its authentic singularity
(Scotus). The path appears here to suggest itself as a summa for our time, as
our conclusion will show in the following pages. But the “way” matters more
than the results, which with Hopkins and in a tradition of thought at once
poetical and mystical, opens onto the contemplation of the Father, source
of every “dappled thing,” and in whom the singularities are truly worthy of
being praised in their “pied beauty”: “Glory be to God for dappled things /
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow / For rose-moles in all stipple
upon trout that swim . . . Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) /
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim / He fathers-forth whose beauty is
past change: Praise him.”94
By Way of Conclusion
Toward an Act of Return
“We want to return to the things themselves [auf die ‘Sachen selbst’ zurück-
gehen].”1 If the return to the “things” (Sachen) is the attempt to get back to
“acts of consciousness” rather than to “beings” (Ding), the demonstration
is again that the phenomena do not relate only to phenomenology. In other
words, the bracketing of the world (reduction) and the return to its modes of
apprehension (constitution) allow the revelation of the lived experiences of
those things that fundamentally make us what we are: our proper relation to
God, to the body, and to others. The mystical dimension also serves here as a
crucible for phenomenology, and vice versa—much like art, poetry, literature,
and other similar disciplines. Better, it discloses some acts where concepts
would otherwise be expected, and describes some manners of being where
one searches in vain for beings or a complete juxtaposition of beings. I am
convinced therefore that in this work the following has been demonstrated:
the choice of fields in which to work was in no way arbitrary, (a) neither from
the point of view of concepts, (b) nor from the point of view of authors.
The Unity of Concepts

(a) Concerning first the concepts—and to begin a new synthesis—God, the
flesh and the other are, today and yesterday, the ground for a history in which
“we live, move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). (I) God first. It has been
shown that his transcendence is not a simple position of existence, but is first
an egoity as engendered in him from self to self. From “relation” and not
simply “substance” (Augustine), the divine is revealed then as “phenomena”
(Erigena) and delivers to us an access to him simply as an “ego” pure and
detached from everything (Eckhart). (II) The flesh second. The “visibility” of
the body is given to view in the formation of Adam (Irenaeus), its “solidity”
in the incarnation of Christ (Tertullian), and its “conversion” in the transfor-
mation of the senses (Bonaventure). (III) The other, finally. From the human
to the divine and among men themselves there is constituted a single and
same “intersubjective community” received from God (Origen), in a “model
of alterity” forged long ago with the question of the angels (Thomas Aqui-
nas), and according to a “mode of singularity” which makes of otherness the
most elevated mode of all haecceity (Duns Scotus).
279
280 By Way of Conclusion
A common world is thus constituted between men and God, the world
“tout court.” What is appropriate to Christianity as it espouses the mode of
incarnation at once phenomenological (Leiblichung) and theological (Men-
schwerdung) is to make the totality of the world a “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt)
common to all humanity and all divinity. There is not, then, God on the one
side, and then the flesh separately, and finally the other. In reality, the flesh
(part II) receives its density only from the God who is manifest in it (part
I), while the other (part III) reveals a new mode of fraternity inasmuch as
it derives from a unique paternity (part I) never separated from its incar-
nate Son (part II). The totality of man can certainly be articulated in terms
of “recapitulation” (Irenaeus), “assumption” (Thomas Aquinas), or “inte-
gration” (Balthasar). But for our time man is understood above all in the
mode and capacity of his own “manifestation” or “phenomenalization” at
the heart of the incarnate Word (Col. 1:15–18). The equivalence of being
and appearing—“soviel Schein, soviel Sein” (so much appearing, so much
being)—is associated with the return to the things themselves as a return
to acts of consciousness: “Zur Sache selbst!,” “return to the thing itself” as
Heidegger glossed it.2 Like the phenomenon, “God” thus has no other reason
for being than being manifest (part I), the “flesh,” no other reason than being
incarnate (part II) and the “other,” no other reason than uniting us with the
One who is thus revealed (part III).
The three terms—God, the flesh, and the other—do not only make one, in
the community of an experience that this spiritual and intellectual approach
would not be able to share. After the example of the great summas of theol-
ogy and of the exitus-reditus movement initiated by John Scotus Erigena
(Periphyseon), one will climb back up a posteriori from the other to the flesh
and from the flesh to God, only after having described a priori the manifesta-
tion of God, and having analyzed the density of the flesh and finally having
constituted alterity according to the mode of an intersubjectivity received
from a Third. In the hypothesis of an act of return, no longer here “to the
things themselves” (phenomenology) but “to God himself” (theology), the
ascending movement a parte creaturae receives therefore its raison d’être from
the descending movement a parte Dei which founds it completely. Like the
Breviloquium of Bonaventure it was fitting in this sense to follow the didactic
way, even though we have additionally taken the heuristic approach.3
The Necessity of Authors

(b) From the point of view of authors, the detour through both the fathers
of the church (Irenaeus, Tertullian, Augustine) and the medievals (Erigena,
Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Eckhart, Duns Scotus) wanted to show in
each case that medieval philosophy did not merely begin with Boethius and
that there was not, for them, some pure philosophy independent of a spe-
cific theological intention. The false ambition to “de-theologize medieval
Toward an Act of Return 281
philosophy,” in the sense that the theological concepts treated in each chap-
ter would only bear a philosophical significance, is meaningless, both by the
yardstick of the medieval horizon and that of our own time. Trinity, theoph-
any, the birth of God in the self, the visibility of Adam’s body, the solidity
of the flesh of Christ, conversion of the senses, community of saints, alterity
of angels, and the singularity of the other are so many ways, today as much
as yesterday, to unfold that which belongs to our common humanity and
to God himself. The théologies d’occasion are not such in the sense that the
“theologoumena” would only be the pretext for the deployment of “philoso-
phemes” which would have comprised the very substance of what is to be
believed.4 In our opinion, there is nothing more absurd than making good
use of a Trinitarian reflection for the sake of a purely logical conceptualiza-
tion of the nature of the “three and one,” or of calling on the Eucharist in
order to debate metaphysically about substance and accident independently
of what the author confesses and of what is subjectively experienced in the
very act of incorporation. The medievals themselves believed and practiced
what is here in question, being themselves students of the highest spheres of
logic (Abelard, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham), or alternatively remain-
ing always anchored in a mysticism which sometimes criticized the abstract
use of theology (Bernard, Eckhart, Suso). In both cases—as much as in every
case—faith is an attitude and an act of adhesion, not a collection of dogmas
or an occasion for philosophical reflection.
As has been emphasized from the very beginning with the support of Eti-
enne Gilson, no one has to share this belief in order to make it the place of
his work in all good conscience. The medievalist will legitimately study the
fathers and the medievals independently of any conviction of faith. But, as we
have also said, it must never be forgotten that the medievals themselves never
read, thought, spoke, or wrote independently of this light of faith in which
they always lived. Medieval philosophy is unique in the sense that it is at
the same time the place where philosophy appears impossible to distinguish
from theology and the fulcrum by which these two disciplines are separated.
In order better to study medieval thought we must therefore take note: the
pluralism of medieval thought is no longer sufficient to justify research that
is ever more sophisticated. The dissolution into historicism sometimes gets
broken up into pluralism. I am certainly not advocating the reassertion of a
teleological vision of the history of philosophy (Hegel). But the “community
of thinkers” also establishes a “community of thought” with even the most
ancient of our forebears. This ought not to be forgotten—even under the
pompous title of the philosopher as “functionary of mankind.”5
Toward a Liberation
In contrast to the “liberation of philosophy by theology” (Balthasar), a “lib-
eration of theology by philosophy” will take place today.6 It is evident that
282 By Way of Conclusion
this does not mean that it is necessary to enslave philosophy to theology as in

the past, but rather that the task is set today for philosophy, and phenomenol-
ogy in particular, to place itself at the service of that which it is not—with the
knowledge that the excess of its technical nature ad intra too often leads us
to forget its fecundity ad extra.7 The relation therefore of potentia absoluta
to potentia ordinata does not only apply to the relation of God to the world,
but also determines the relation of theology to phenomenology, at least as far
as the contribution of phenomenology to medieval philosophy is concerned:
“To give to another the power of doing something, rather than of doing it by
oneself alone” (William of Auxerre).8 It is true, some will say, that theology
in its grandeur is sufficient in itself, which, in a word, liberates philosophy
and justifies its autonomy. By right, it is fitting to leave philosophy to itself
and theology to itself—unless one accepts, as we tend to do in relation to
medieval philosophy today, the encroachment of philosophy onto the terrain
of theology in order to extract that which would only allegedly lie within
the jurisdiction of philosophy. But, in fact, the true grandeur of theology is
totally different. In the act of his kenosis, God becomes the proper object of
theology and makes the choice not to be satisfied in himself. He who could
demonstrate anything by himself (the absolute power of theology) neverthe-
less leaves to be shown and revealed by another that which it does not and
ought not to exhibit all alone (the conditional power of phenomenology).
Far from some kind of serfdom or a petty service, phenomenology and theol-
ogy respond to each other in a mutual way, similar to the incessant dialogue
between God and man. There is nothing here of some new method, a flavor
of the day or the blusterings of the spirit of the age. It is first and above all a
matter of experience.
The Book of Experience

Hodie legimus in libro experientae—“Today we read from the book of expe-
rience.” This formula of Bernard of Clairvaux, cited in the “Introduction,”
ought now to serve as the spearhead for a new path of research, one even
more fundamental.9 The ontic diversity of the fields of study—“God, the
flesh, and the other”—still in fact awaits its ontological grounding. Said oth-
erwise, and in the terms of Martin Heidegger, the regional ontologies require
a fundamental ontology by which they are fully justified.10 Experience, at
least in the medieval epoch, furnishes us with the key. In the germination
of the Middle Ages, and in particular the monastic renaissance (eleventh to
twelfth centuries), life takes precedence again over work, and the commu-
nity over the emergence of individualities. Here emerge the attitudes from
which concepts derive and are tied together the lived experiences where dis-
course is rooted. The act of a return to the things themselves opens therefore
onto the act of an ascent to experience itself, which includes the reading
and production of texts themselves: “Experiences are understood,” warns
Toward an Act of Return 283
Martin Heidegger in a preparatory note from his course on the Philosophi-

cal Foundations of Medieval Mysticism (1918–1919), “and indeed, genuinely
so, and as such, they are themselves . . . Above all: understandability does
not mean ‘rationalization,’ dissolution of experience into its ‘logical compo-
nents.’ ”11This is precisely “understood.” If medieval mysticism is not opposed
to the burgeoning dialectic, nor affective theology to Scholastic philosophy,
then that is because every élan toward God requires a certain formalization
(intuition with concept) and all rigor in argumentation finds its end in con-
templation (concept with intuition).12 Philosophical experience joins up with
monastic experience in a new way—of which the ancient secrets of Anselm of
Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugh and Richard of Saint Victor along
with others, mark the steps of a path yet to be taken.13
Notes
Translator’s Foreword
1. See, for example, John van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden
King (Indiana University Press, 1994), esp. 157–202; and Ted Kisiel, The Genesis
of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
2. Falque’s first monograph, on Saint Bonaventure, was explicitly “theological”
(though we already know enough to be wary of assuming then that there is no
philosophy within it, or worse, that it has no import for philosophy); Emmanuel
Falque, Saint Bonaventure et l’entrée de Dieu en théologie (Paris: Vrin, 2001).
3. The specifically phenomenological path of this process is emphasized by
the subtitle of the recent Spanish translation: “reflexiones fenomenológicas.” See
Dios, la carne y el otro: De Ireneo a Duns Escoto: Reflexiones fenomenológicas
(Bogotá, Colombia: Siglio del Hombre, 2012).
4. See Hans-Dieter Gondek and Laszlo Tengyeli, Neue Phänomenologie in
Frankreich (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011), a powerful study that seeks to characterize
the distinctive elements of the numerous instantiations of the French tradition of
phenomenology today, and which devotes significant chapters to a number of his
contemporaries, but unfortunately no space to Falque’s work.
5. Recently translated into English: Emmanuel Falque, The Metamorphosis of
Finitude: An Essay on Birth and Resurrection, trans. George Hughes (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2012).
6. Ibid., x.
7. In Nietzsche, as Didier Franck has shown, the dogma is the “eternal recur-
rence,” and in Heidegger the dogma is similar to Kant, or rather a development
of it: the a priori, and dogmatic, refusal of the pertinence of the Christian God
for the philosophical understanding of the human, for the intelligibility of the
human as such. The question in the latter case especially is whether or not this
refusal itself implies a theology, what we would have to call the “blank” theology
of Heidegger’s philosophy. For the former argument see Franck’s Nietzsche et
l’ombre de Dieu (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010). For Michel Hen-
ry’s little-known discussion of the resurrection, see his conclusion to Philosophy
and Phenomenology of the Body, trans. Gerard Eitzkorn (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1975), 183–222, esp. 208–10.
8. Emmanuel Falque, Les noces de l’Agneau (Paris: Cerf, 2011).
9. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 5: The Realm of Meta-
physics in the Modern Age, trans. John Riches et al. (San Francisco: Ignatius,
1991), 656.
10. Ibid., 646.
11. This is made explicit, and in an extended manner, vis-a-vis the analy-
sis of Christ’s anxiety in his own human being-before-death in Le passeur de
285
286 Notes to Pages xv–3
Gethsémani (Paris: Cerf, 1999). In this case, Christ’s cry of dereliction from the
cross, for example, is paradigmatically human, according to faith the most human
of human words to have ever been uttered. Thus their very theological character
bears within it the possibility of deepening the philosophical inquiry concerning
our humanity as finite and as mortal.
12. It is worth recalling here Jean-François Courtine’s brief comments in Phe-
nomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, by Dominique
Janicaud et al. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 121–26.
13. This does not mean “uninfluenced” by phenomenology: Xavier Tilliette, of
course, has written volumes on Merleau-Ponty, for example. See Tilliette, Mau-
rice Merleau-Ponty ou la mesure de l’homme (Paris: Seghers, 1970).
14. See, in the first place, Jean-Luc Marion, “On the Foundation of the Dis-
tinction between Theology and Philosophy,” in Philosophy, Religions and
Transcendence, ed. Philippe Capelle-Dumont (Manila: Ataneo University Press,
2010), 47–76; and Jean-Luc Marion, “Remarques sur l’utilité en théologie de la
phénoménologie,” Archivio di Filosofia 79, no. 2 (2011): 11–22.
15. See Certitudes négatives (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 2010).
16. Emmanuel Falque, “The Phenomenological Act of Perscrutatio in the
Proemium of St. Bonaventure’s Commentary on the Sentences,” Medieval Phi-
losophy and Theology, 10, no. 1 (2001): 1–22; Emmanuel Falque, “Metaphysics
and Theology in Tension: A Reading of Augustine’s De Trinitate,” in Augustine
and Postmodern Thought: A New Alliance Against Modernity? ed. Lieven Boeve
(Leuven, 2009), 21–55; and Emmanuel Falque, “Lavartus pro Deo: Jean-Luc
Marion’s Phenomenology and Theology,” in Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-
Luc Marion, ed. Kevin Hart (South Bend, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press,
2007), 181–99.
17. Which includes a brief introduction to his thought and a working bib-
liography: Tarek Dika and Chris Hackett, eds., Quiet Powers of the Possible:
Interviews in Contemporary French Phenomenology (New York: Fordham Uni-
versity Press, 2015).
18. Christina M. Gschwandtner, Postmodern Apologetics? Arguments for
God in Contemporary Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013),
184–208.
19. Christina M. Gschwandtner, “Corporeality, Animality, Bestiality: Emman-
uel Falque on Incarnate Flesh,” Analecta Hermeneutica 4 (2012): 1–16.
20. This appeared as the second chapter of Boeve, Augustine and Postmodern
Thought: A New Alliance Against Modernity? See n. 16, supra.
Preface to the English-Language Edition

1. See the Metamorphosis of Finitude: An Essay on Birth and Resurrection
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2012) and Passer le Rubicon, philosophie
et théologie: Essai sur les frontières (Brussels: Lessius, 2013), currently being
translated. I also add Saint Bonaventure et l’entrée de Dieu en théologie (Paris:
Vrin, 2000), which will soon appear in English as well.
Fons Signatus: The Sealed Source

1. Max Scheler, Vom Ewigen im Menschen (1922), in Gesammelte Werke
(Bonn: 1970), vol. 5, p. 13. Compare the English translation, On the Eternal in
Notes to Pages 3–10 287
Man, trans. Bernard Noble (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1972), 18: “As the
method used in the descriptive study of Weltanschauungen, [it] is in fact a ‘com-
mon whore’ [Mädchen fur alles]. It is in the very fact that it is a ‘common whore’
[Mädchen fur alles] that its outstanding, positive value lies.”
2. Ibid.
3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith
(New York: Routledge, 2002), viii.
4. Alain de Libera, Penser au Moyen Âge (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 25.
5. Pierre Alferi, Guillaume d’Ockham: Le singulier (Paris: Minuit, 1989), 7.
6. Olivier Boulnois, in St. Bonaventure, Les six jours de la création (Paris: Des-
clée/Cerf, 1991), preface, p. 10.
7. Jean-François Courtine, Suarez et le système de la métaphysique (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), 91–98.
8. Rémi Brague, “L’anthropologie de l’humilité,” in St. Bernard et la philoso-
phie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), 152.
9. Emmanuel Martineau, Malevitch et la philosophie (Lausanne: L’Âge
d’Homme, 1977), 13.
10. Falque, Saint Bonaventure et l’entrée de Dieu en théologie, 22.
11. See, respectively, Bonaventure, Sententiae sententiarum, prooemium, I, 1
(Quarrachi); Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 57 (English translation modified).
To sound (ergründen) and to found (begründen) are also in Heidegger’s Being
and Time, §7. For all of this I refer you to my article, “Le proemium de Com-
mentaire des Sentences ou l’acte phenomenologique de la perscrutatio chez saint
Bonaventure,” in Archivum Fransiscanum Historicum (Rome: Grottaferrata,
2004), 275–300.
12. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Heidegger et l’histoire de la philosophie,” in Mar-
tin Heidegger, Cahiers de l’Hern (1983; Paris: Grasset, 1989), 124.
13. These are, of course, the stages of the present work.
14. See Alain de Libera, La philosophie médiévale (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1989), 72–73.
15. Claude Romano, Le chant de la vie: Phénoménologie de Faulkner (Paris:
Gallimard, 2005), 18–19 (emphasis in original).
16. See A. de Muralt, La métaphysique du phénomène: Les origines médiévales
et l’élaboration de la pensée phénoménologique (Paris: Vrin, 1985); and D. Perler,
Théories de l’intentionnalité au Moyen Âge (Paris: Vrin, 2004).
17. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York:
SUNY Press, 1996), §7, p. 24.
18. John Scotus Erigena, On the Division of Nature, bk. 1 (452B).
19. Tertullian, De Resurrectione carnis, IX, 2–3.
20. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, respectively Ia, q. 56, a. 2, ad. 3 (on
intentionality) and Ia, q. 51, a. 2, ad. 1 (on the angelic assumption of body in
order to appear to us).
21. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 2, “Introduction,” §2 (volume
1 in the 2001 Routledge edition, ed. Dermot Moran, p. 168). See also Jean-Luc
Marion’s commentary on this text that is decisive for the birth of phenomenology:
Reduction and Givenness, trans. Thomas A. Carlson, §1.1, “Two Interpretations
and a Broadening” (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 4–11.
288 Notes to Pages 10–12
22. Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. Lee Hardy (Dor-
drecht, Neth.: Springer, 1999), 19.
23. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phe-
nomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press,
1970), 394–95.
24. Heidegger, Being and Time, 17.
25. Rémi Brague, St. Bernard et la philosophie, 151–52 (emphasis added). This
conviction is developed by the apposite finale of another article of Brague’s, “Un
modèle médiéval de la subjectivité: La chair,” in Ibn Rochd, Maimonide, Saint
Thomas d’Aquin, Colloque de Cordoue, 8–10 mai 1992 (Paris: Climat, 1992),
62: “I have emphasized some points of contact with certain contemporary prob-
lems which could make this concept pertinent to our concerns today. In doing
this, however, I do not intend to enroll the history of philosophy in the service
of such or such of our intellectual modes. Yet I think that contemporary reflec-
tions ought not to be limited to dialogue with either ancient or modern authors,
and that the medieval authors in particular ought to be considered fully valuable
partners and worth listening to” (emphasis added).
26. Scheler, Vom Ewigen im Menschen, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5, p. 13,
cited by Jean Greisch, Le buisson ardent et les lumières de la raison, vol. 2, p. 367
(emphasis added). Compare, again, the English translation, On the Eternal in
Man, 18: “The descriptive method, not aiming at essential philosophical insights,
of reducing given religious and metaphysical systems . . . to their original empiri-
cal contents, i.e. of reconstructing and re-intuiting the basis of what appears in
them . . . thereby revitalizing its original meaning and restoring its perceptual
validity for today—this, as the descriptive study . . .”
27. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W.
Scott Palmer (New York: Humanities, 1970), 240–41: “But there is a last enter-
prise that might be undertaken. It would be to seek experience at its source, or
rather, above this decisive turn where, taking a bias in the direction of our utility,
it becomes properly human experience.” See Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s comments
in L’union de l’âme et du corps chez Malebranche, Biran et Bergson (1968; Paris:
Vrin, 2002), 111–17.
28. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Canticle, vol. 1, Sources chrétiennes
414, Serm. 3, 1 (Paris: Cerf, 1996), 101.
29. See Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe 60, letter to Fr. Von Hermann dated
from March 27, 1919, cited by Rémi Brague, Saint Bernard et la philosophie,
186: “In the posthumous papers of Heidegger, there is found a single page that
has relation to Bernard of Clairvaux. It bears the title: ‘On the Sermones Bernardi
in canticum canticorum.’ It contains the manuscript copied by Heidegger (written
in lowercase letters) of Serm. 3.”
30. Heidegger, Being and Time §6, p. 20 (Eng. translation modified).
31. Martin Heidegger, Traité des catégories et de la signification chez Duns
Scot [Treatise on the Categories and Signification in Duns Scotus] (Paris: Gal-
limard, 1970), 32 and 35.
32. Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (New Bruns-
wick, N.J.: Transaction, 2008); Edith Stein, “The Phenomenology of Husserl
and the Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas,” in Knowledge and Faith, trans.
Walter Redmond (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 2000); and
Hannah Arendt, Love and St. Augustine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996).
33. Edmund Husserl, Ideas I, trans. F. Kersten (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff,
1982), respectively §59, p. 136 and §24, p. 44.
34. Martin Heidegger, “Letter to Krebs” (January 9, 1919), in Supplements:
From the Earliest Essays to “Being and Time” and Beyond, ed. John van Buren
(Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2002), 69–70. “Epistemological insights, extending
to a theory of historical knowledge, have made the system of Catholicism prob-
lematic and unacceptable to me, but not Christianity and metaphysics, these,
though, in a new sense . . . I firmly believe that I—perhaps more than your col-
leagues who officially work in this field—have experienced what the Catholic
Middle Ages bears within itself regarding values and that we are still a long way
off from appreciating them.”
35. See Immanuel Kant, “Architectonic of Pure Reason,” in The Critique of
Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (Boston: Bedford St. Martins, 1965),
653–65.
36. See I. Bochet’s book Augustin dans la pensée de Paul Ricoeur (Paris: Edi-
tions de la faculté jésuite de Paris, 2004), as well as my review in Transversalités:
Revue de l’Institut catholique de Paris 92 (October-December 2004). For the tri-
ple epochê in the act of reading (of the author, reader, and the referent), see Paul
Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutical Function of Distantiation,” in Hermeneutics and
the Human Sciences, trans. John Brookshire Thompson (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), 131–44.
37. Jean Decorte, “L’art de lire au Moyen Âge,” in Le vaste monde à livre
ouvert: Manuscrits médiévaux en dialogue ave l’art contemporain (Lannoo,
2004), 95–106, citation from p. 96.
38. Hugh of Saint Victor, De Verbo Dei, in Six opuscules spirituels, Sources
chrétiennes 155, V, 1 (Paris: Cerf, 1969), 77.
39. See Saint Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God, I, 7 (Mahwah, N.J.:
Paulist, 1978): “He has taught the knowledge of truth according to the threefold
mode of theology: symbolic, literal and mystical, so that through the symbolic we
may rightly use sensible things” (62–63).
40. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorian Cairns (Boston:
Kluwer Academic, 1995), §16, pp. 38–39.
41. Bonaventure, Hexaemeron [The Six Days of Creation], XIII, 12. See my
commentary Saint Bonaventure et l’entrée de Dieu en théologie (Paris: Vrin,
2000), §12, esp. pp. 178–80. On the exposition of the status of the book and
hermeneutics, see below, chap. 6.
42. I take the opposite stance from Paul Ricoeur, not because mediation has
no value, far from it in fact, but only in the sense that too much for him centers
on the modalities of the text and its act of reception by the reader, and he forgets
the immediate lived experience which is also a key question and takes primacy.
See his Conflict of Interpretations (London: Continuum, 2004), 10: “substituting,
for the short route of the Analytic of Dasein [which I attempt to rediscover in
medieval philosophy], the long route which begins by analysis of language [the
mediation of texts]” (text in brackets added by Falque. –Trans.).
43. Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, trans.
Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 149.
44. See C. Sommer’s definitive demonstration in Heidegger, Aristote, Luther:

les sources aristotéliciennes et néotestamentaires de Être et temps (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 2005).
45. I will not engage here in a debate from the past that has been exhausted
now for decades. I will retain only an agreement with Gilson that one does not
need to have Christian faith as a conditio sine qua non for the study of medieval
philosophy. Yet it ought to be recognized, nevertheless, that the medievals them-
selves did not think outside of the light of faith, which prohibited them from
choosing between philosophy and theology and thereby amputating one or the
other part of their body. See R. Imbach’s fine-tuned discussion in “La philoso-
phie médiévale et l’histoire,” in Christian Trottmann and Anca Vasiliu, actes du
colloque du samedi 23 octobre 2004 (Collège International de Philosophie), La
philosophie médiévale : Historiographie d’hier et de demain, forthcoming.
46. Etienne Gilson (under the Latin name Stephanus), “Les recherches historico-
critiques et l’avenir de la scolastique,” in Scholastica ratione historico-ristauranda
(Rome: 1951), 133–42 (citation 139).
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., 137.
49. Ibid., 142. Let me add that this realization that the philosopher as neces-
sarily attached to theology and made fruitful by it in all of its convictions of
faith, becomes more and more present as Gilson’s work develops. Thus, in 1974,
only a few years before his death (1978) and exactly fifty years after writing The
Philosophy of St. Bonaventure (1924), he will avow that “this attempt to define
Bonaventure as a philosopher has no less gravely deformed his figure” (in S.
Bonaventura, 1274–1974 [Rome: Grotafferata, 1974], 2).
50. Henry Dumery, Critique et religion: Problèmes des méthodes en philoso-
phie de la religion (Paris: Sedes, 1957), 18 (emphasis added).
51. For this distinction see Jean Greisch, Le buisson ardent et les lumières de la
raison (Paris: Cerf, 2002), vol. 1, p. 34.
52. Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God, I, 7, p. 63 (English translation
modified).
53. Jean Baruzi, “De l’emploi légitime et de l’emploi abusif du mot mystique,”
in L’intelligence mystique (Paris: Berg International, 1985), 67.
54. For exegesis of this verse (Sententiae sententiarum, Prooemium, I, 1), see
my article on the Proemium of Bonaventure, supra. Concerning the different
meanings of “worldview” (Weltanschauung), see Edith Stein, “La signification
de la phénoménologie comme conception du monde,” in Phénoménologie et phi-
losophie chrétienne (Paris: Cerf, 1987), 1–4.
Introduction to Part One

1. Martin Heidegger, “The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics”
(1957), in Identity and Difference, 55 (English translation modified).
2. Falque, Saint Bonaventure ou l’entrée de Dieu en théologie, “Introduc-
tion,” 19–27: “l’hypothèse phénoménologique et le Breviloquium.”
3. Respectively, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781), “Transcen-
dental Dialectic,” chap. 3, “The Ideal of Pure Reason,” p. 525: “Transcendental
theology . . . believes that it can know the existence of such a being through mere
concepts, without the help of any experience whatsoever, and is then entitled
onto-theology”; and Martin Heidegger, “The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of

Metaphysics” (1957), in Identity and Difference, 42–73.
4. See Frederic Nef, Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique? (Paris: Gallimard, “Folio-
Essais,” 2004); in particular 231–412 (4th part): “l’onto-theo-logie introuvable.”
I will note however, and in contrast to the allegations of the author, that this
attestation of an “onto-theo-logie introuvable” in the history of thought does not
stand up against the works of the phenomenologists themselves—to the contrary.
It is precisely in the searching that one recognizes that they haven’t found it. This
does not make vain the enterprise itself but rather justifies it at least negatively.
As for him wanting to draw the conclusion that it is necessary to take the “exact
contre-pied” of the overcoming of metaphysics (23), this is an affirmation that, I
think, leaves the debate in the triviality of a fight. The “vulgate du depassement”
(217) ought itself certainly be overcome. This does not qualify, if we approach it
properly, the quest for another discourse—but orients it this time less toward the
incrimination of categories of the past (the negative side of onto-theo-logie) and
more toward the opening of new concepts or new fields for thought (the positive
side of the exit of metaphysics).
5. Alain de Libera, La philosophie médiévale (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1992, 2nd ed. corr.), “Que sais-je,” n. 1044, pp. 72–73 (emphasis
mine). Demonstration established definitively by J.-F. Courtine, Inventio analo-
giae: Métaphysiques et ontothéologie (Paris: Vrin, 2005), 1st part, pp. 11–99:
“Métaphysique et pensée de l’être.”
6. Martin Heidegger, Traité des catégories et de la signification chez Duns Scot
(1915; Paris: Gallimard, 1970). (I say “without knowing it,” because in 1915,
Heidegger thought, like everyone else then, the work was by Duns Scotus himself.)
7. See Nef, Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique?, 5th part, pp. 740 and 746 (“La
metaphysique—le retour”): “The themes of the end, of overcoming, of the accom-
plishment and death of metaphysics does not truly contain an argument. . . .
Throughout this book we have defended the possibility of a metaphysic which
preserves the theoretical ideal, or better, the theoretics of the Greeks, and it is in
this perspective that we have highlighted the importance of speculative meta-
physics, the insufficiency of descriptions and conceptual analyses, intriguing in
themselves.”
8. See Jean-Luc Marion, On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism: The Constitution
and Limits of Onto-theo-logy in Cartesian Thought, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 6–7.
9. Boethius, De Trinitate, in Courts traits de théologie (oposcula sacra) (Paris:
Le Cerf, 1991), chap. 4, pp. 135–36, translation modified: “If one turns these
categories toward God in order to attribute them to him, all these attributes
undergo a transformation [at haec cum quis in divinum vertit praedicationem,
cuncta mutantur quae praedicari possunt]” (trans. Alain de Libera, Métaphysique
et noétique, Albert le Grand [Paris: Vrin, 2005], 145).
Chapter 1
1. See respectively, Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, VIII, 1–2 (in E. Robillard,
Justin, L’itinéraire philosophique [Paris: Cerf, 1989], 143); and B. Sesboüé,
Jésus-Christ dans la tradition de l’Eglise (Paris: Le Cerf, 1990), 97–98 (“un ‘c’est-
a-dire’ ou un redoublement”): Nous croyons . . . en un seul Seigneur Jésus-Christ,
le Fils de Dieu, ne Monogène du Père, c’est–à-dire de la substance du Père, Dieu

de Dieu, Lumière de Lumière, vrai Dieu de vrai Dieu, engendré non pas créé,
consubstantiel au Père [“We believe . . . in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God,
only-begotten of the Father, that is, of the substance of the Father, God from God,
Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, one in being with
the Father”] (Council of Nicaea 325 a.d.).
2. See respectively, Hans Küng, Être chrétien (Paris: Le Seuil, 1978), 141; and
A. Grillmeier, “Jésus de Nazareth, dans l’ombre du Fils de Dieu au Christ image
de Dieu,” in Comment être chrétien? La réponse de H. Küng (collective) (Paris:
Desclée de Brouwer, 1978), 128.
3. See Michel Henry, I Am the Truth, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 2003), 10– 11. See my contribution made in the
presence of the author (Collège International de Philosophie): “Michel Henry
théologien: A propos de C’est moi la vérité,” Laval théologique et philosophique
57, no. 3 (October 2001): 525–36.
4. See Jean-Luc Marion, The Idol and Distance, trans. Thomas A. Carlson.
(1977; New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), xxxvii.
5. Martin Heidegger, “Introduction to ‘What Is Metaphysics?’ ” (1949), in
Pathmarks, trans. William McNeil (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), 279.
6. Heidegger, Identity and Difference, n. 3 p. 57.
7. The inscription of Holzwege (Heidegger) and its reference to “the path in
the forest encumbered with undergrowth” and to “the lumberjacks and foresters
who know these paths” seems in fact to indicate—despite the German expression
“auf dem Holzweg sein” (to take a wrong path)—first the opening of a new way,
or of a side road that opens along the impasse.
8. I take the hypothesis of a “discovery- concealment” from the work of
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenom-
enology, in which the author designates Galileo as “a genius who at the same
time discovered and concealed” (52): “Discovering” in the sense that he discov-
ered “mathematical nature, the methodical idea . . . the law of causality” (52–53);
and “concealing” in the sense that he “represents the life-world, dressing it up as
‘objectively and actual true’ nature” (51) (trans. modified).
9. St. Augustine, De Trinitate (Bibliotheque Augustinienne, Paris: Desclee de
Brouwer, 1955), V, 4, p. 429 (vol. 15): “We begin therefore by responding to
the adversaries of our faith concerning those questions for which the expression
does not equal the thought, nor the thought the reality.” [Note: Falque uses this
bilingual Bibliotheque Augustinienne edition of the De Trinitate, and he often
freely modifies the translation for his own purposes. In this chapter, therefore,
I stick to close renderings of Falque’s French, especially where he departs from
the Bibliotheque Aug. Finally, our references will be to the page numbers of the
Bibliotheque Aug. edition, along with the universal book and division numbers
of the De Trinitate. –Trans.]
10. Augustine, De Trinitate, V, 4, p. 429.
11. Aristotle, Organon, Categories 4, 1b, 25 (in The Complete Works of Aris
totle, ed. Jonathan Barnes [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984], 1:4);
and Augustine, De Trinitate, V, 6, p. 433. Double inversion of ubi and quando
and situs and habitus (also occurring in the Confessions, IV, 16, 28); referred to
by Irénée Chevalier in La théorie augustinienne des relations trinitaires, analyse

explicative des textes (reprinted Divus Thomas [Librairie de l’Université, Fri-
bourg, 1940]), n. 1, p. 12. Whatever one considers this double transfer to be
(the Stagirite himself does not respect a fixed order of enumeration when he
studies each category in particular), the reference to Aristotle remains no less
explicit.
13. Ibid., V, 4, p. 429.
14. Profession of faith of Arius in Saint Athanasius, De Synodis, in Nicene
and Post-Nicene Fathers, 4.2, §22. In the context of this work I am not able to
develop any further the Arian argumentation, particularly as it concerns the rela-
tion of the unbegotten (agennêtos) to the begotten (gennêtos) which separates the
Father and the Son into two distinct substances. These debates are probably well
enough known to the reader. For more of the details of Arianism we offer to the
reader the entire “profession of faith of Arius” which comes down to us from St.
Athanasius (De Synodis), as well as to the simple summary of the argumentation
by P. Gallay in the introduction to Gregory Nazianzen, Discours théologiques:
Sources chrétiennes, vol. 250 (Paris: Cerf, 1979), 25–28.
15. Augustine, De Trinitate, V, 6, p. 435: “But note that the Father is called
Father only because he has a son, and that the Son is called son only because he
has a Father. These are not qualifications pertaining to the order of substance”
(non secundum substantiam haec dicuntur).
16. B. Sesboüé, Jésus-Christ dans la tradition de l’Eglise (Paris: Desclée, 1982),
102.
17. Aristotle, Metaphysics, bk. Lambda.
18. Augustine, De Trinitate, V. 5, p. 433.
19. Aristotle, Metaphysics, bk. Lambda.
20. J. Moltmann, The Crucified God, trans. R. A. Wilson and John Bowden
(London: Society of Christian Missionaries, 1974), 235 : “What happened on the
cross was an event between God and God. There was a profound division in God
inasmuch as God abandons God and is contradicted.”
21. Augustine, De Trinitate, V, 6, p. 435: “The Son is ever-begotten [semper
natus est], and has never begun to be Son [nec coepit unquam esse Filius].”
22. Ibid., V, 6, p. 435. We can complete this reference by quoting the follow-
ing passage (DT, V, 6, p. 433): “In God there is no accidental attribution at all
because in him there is nothing changing.”
23. Ibid., V, 6, p. 433.
24. Ibid., VII, 7, p. 531.
25. See Falque, St. Bonaventure et l’entrée de Dieu en théologie, §4, pp. 55–63:
“la fin de l’empire du ti esti.”
26. Augustine, De Trinitate, V, 6, p. 433 (translation modified).
27. I recall here, of course, the work of Stanislas Breton, L’esse in et l’esse ad
dans la métaphysique de la relation (Rome, 1951).
28. Aristotle, Categories, 1b 25–26, p. 4.
30. Ibid., V, 6, p. 435. “These appellations do not pertain to the order of sub-
stance but to relation [sed secundum relativum], relation which is not an accident
[quod tamen relativum non est accidens] because it is foreign to change.”
31. Ibid., VII, 2, p. 511. See also DT, VII, 2, p. 513: “It is not truly according to
this model, but . . . [non ergo ita, sed . . .].”
32. Aristotle, Categories, 5, 2a, 25, p. 4.
33. Augustine, De Trinitate, VII, 2, p. 511. “ad aliquid coloratum referetur
color” (color refers to the something that is colored). See Aristotle, Categories, 5,
2a, 25, p. 4.
34. Augustine, De Trinitate, VII, 2, p. 511.
35. Ibid., VII, 2, pp. 513–15. Without developing any further this argument
that is at once scriptural and theological directed against the Arian interpretation
of Christ exclusively as “power and wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24) I note only
here that the question of the meaning of this verse—standing at the beginning
of both book VI, I (p. 469) and book VII, I (p. 503) of De Trinitate—suffices to
indicate the nicely polemical character of the present discussion.
36. I will return later to the question of the possible validity of this structure by
means of introducing a distinction between “relative qualification” and “absolute
qualification.”
38. Ibid., VII, 4, p 519.
39. As in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.
40. It is to Balthasar’s merit that he emphasized this scheme of “aesthetic
expression” as a solution to the aporias of Trinitarian theology (which the bishop
of Hippo neither could nor should have used in his personal reappropriation of
the Greek-Latin tradition): “The Father is the ground, the Son is the manifesta-
tion; the Father is content, the Son form . . . Here, too, there is no ground without
manifestation, no content without form. In the beautiful these two things are
but one; and they rest in one another.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of
the Lord, vol. I: Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco:
Ignatius, 1982), 611.
41. Though not explicit in these books of De Trinitate, this distinction is made
manifest in De Diversis quaestionibus VII ad Simplicianum, 83, q. 51 (Bibliothèque
augustinienne, vol. 10, p. 132; see also the complementary note n. 51, p. 730).
42. Augustine, De Trinitate, VI, 11, p. 497.
43. Etienne Gilson, Introduction à l’étude de Saint Augustin (Paris: Vrin,
1943), 277.
45. Ibid., VII, 5. P. 523.
46. Ibid., VII, 7, p. 527.
47. Eberhad Jüngel, “Silencing God through the Exaggeration of Language,”
in God as the Mystery of the World, trans. J. C. B. Mohr (Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Eerdmans, 1983), 255–60.
48. Heidegger, Identity and Difference, 54–55: “Someone who has experienced
theology in his own roots, both the theology of the Christian faith and that of
philosophy, would today rather remain silent about God when he is speaking in
the realm of thinking.”
49. Marion, On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism, 336: “By destitution, one must
understand a disqualification which does not criticize metaphysics in its own
order, but takes precautions against its unjust crossing into ‘the order of charity’
by reducing it from the point of view of this very same charity.”
50. Augustine, De Trinitate, V, 1 (prologue), p. 425.

51. Ibid., 7, p. 527.
52. Ibid., V, 1, p. 425.
53. Ibid., V, 1, p. 425.
54. See Jean-François Courtine, Suarez et le système de la métaphysique (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), 98. The author himself emphasizes here
the occurrences of the term “other” (italicized in the text) indicating in this way—
and paradoxically starting from Thomas Aquinas—the break which separates
philosophy (prima philosophia) from theology (scientia divina).
55. Augustine, De Trinitate, VII, 11, p. 543 (translation modified).
56. See Immanuel Kant, “On the Failure of All Attempted Theodicies” (1793),
trans. M. Despland, in Kant on History and Religion (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 1973), 283–97. “That this time of testing ought to be, to the
eyes of the supreme wisdom, the absolute condition of joy that we will taste one
day . . . is a position that can be stated, but not one that can be understood . . . ;
the knot can be cut, but not untied” (concerning the justification of “evils” in the
context of theodicy).
57. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. L. Lafuma (Paris: Seuil, 1962), n. 308, and ed. L.
Bruschvicg (Paris: Flammarion, 1993), n. 793.
58. I. Chevalier, Saint Augustin et la pensée grecque (Université de Fribourg,
Librairie de l’Université, 1940), 75 (emphasis mine).
60. Ibid., V, 7, p. 438.
61. Ibid., V, 9, pp. 442–45.
62. Ibid., VII, 2, pp. 508–9.
63. Ibid., VII, 2, pp. 508–11.
64. Ibid., VII, 7, p. 511.
65. Ibid., VII, 7, p. 527.
66. See respectively: (1) for Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind
(Regulae ad directionem in genii), Rule VI, in Descartes: Philosophical Essays,
trans. Laurence J. Lafleur (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), 165: “In this
respect, the secret of the entire method consists in the fact that in all things we
diligently note that which is most absolute. For from certain points of view cer-
tain things are more absolute than others, while from another point of view
they are more relative.” See in support, Jean-Luc Marion, Sur l’ontologie grise de
Descartes, §13 (Paris: Vrin, 2002), pp. 78–85, esp. n. 22, pp. 80–81; for Husserl,
Cartesian Meditations (1929), “1st Meditation,” § 10, pp. 23– 25: “Digres-
sion: Descartes’ Failure to Make the Transcendental Turn.” The hypothesis of a
“missed turn” in Descartes returns in Husserl’s The Crisis of the European Sci-
ences, 82–83.
67. Augustine, De Trinitate, VII, 2, pp. 508–11.
68. Ibid., VII, 2, p. 511. In this entire passage, Augustine reproduces explicitly
the same examples as the Stagirite himself in order to designate the “correlation”
in play in every relative qualification (master/slave . . .). See Aristotle, Categories,
VII, 6b25, p. 12.
70. Aristotle, Categories, VII, 8b12, p. 14.
72. Ibid., V, 7, p. 439. “Father and Son are not called such in relation to each
other in the same way as “friends” or “neighbors” are. One speaks of a friend
relative to a friend and if the two friends love in the same way, the friendship is
identical [aequaliter] in both of them. One speaks of ‘neighbor’ in relation to a
neighbor, and since the neighbors are equally neighbors to each other . . . , the
neighborship is identical [aequaliter] in both of them. Yet ‘son’ is not relative to
a son but to a father.”
73. Aristotle, Categories, VII 6b25, p. 11.
74. Augustine, De Trinitate, V, 7, p. 439. “It is therefore not in the sense of his
relation to the Father that the Son is equal to the Father, and it remains the case
that he is in a sense absolute [ad se dicitur]. But all absolute qualification has a
substantial value [quidquid autem ad se dicitur, secundum substantiam dicitur].
It remains the case therefore that the equality of Son pertains to the substantial
order [restat ergo ut secundum substantiam sit aequalis].”
75. Ibid., VI, 4–6, pp. 477–83.
76. Ibid., VI, 1, p. 469.
77. Chevalier, Saint Augustine et la pensée grecque, 83.
79. Ibid., V, 6, p. 433.
80. Ibid., VII, 2, p. 511.
81. Ibid., V, 10, p. 449.
82. Ibid., V, 10, p. 449.
83. See Falque, Saint Bonaventure et l’entrée de Dieu en théologie, §4, pp. 55–63.
84. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Prima pars, q. 29 a. 4. resp.
85. Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 15: “For this reason, metaphysically
thought, God is called the summum ens. The apex of his being consists in his
being the summum bonum . . . The summum bonum is rather the purest expres-
sion of causality which is appropriate to the purely real, in accordance with its
effectuating the persistence of everything that can persist.”
86. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 3 a. 4 ad. 2.
87. Jean- Luc Marion, “Thomas Aquinas and Ontotheology,” in Mystics:
Presence and Aporia, ed. Michael Kessler and Christian Sheppard (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003), 38–73: “The esse that Thomas Aquinas rec-
ognizes for God does not open any metaphysical horizon, does not belong to any
onto-theo-logy, and remains such a distant analogy with what we once conceived
through the concept of being, that God proves not to take any part in it, or to
belong to it, or even—as paradoxical as it may seem—to be. Esse refers to God
only insofar as God may appear as without being” (64, emphasis added). For the
noble confession of a “retraction” see the original French text, “Saint Thomas
d’Aquin et l’onto-théo-logie,” Revue thomiste (January-March 1995): n. 2, p.
33: “On these two points (onto-theology and a confusion of Being and beings)
I ought to nuance my position in God without Being by the following partial
retractions” (emphasis added).
88. Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, p. 6 (emphasis added).
89. One will find some refinements of this key distinction, although never for-
mulated in these terms, in J.-B. Lotz, Martin Heidegger et Thomas d’Aquin (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1988), 29–46.
90. Grimm’s tale of “The Hedgehog and the Hare” is already used by Hei-
degger in order to state the “Conciliation” (Austrag) of being and beings. See
Heidegger, Identity and Difference, 62–63.
91. See supra.
92. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia q. 45 a. 3 resp.
93. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, book II (“The Creation”), ch.
18, n. 2. “For creation is not a changing thing, but is the mere dependence of cre-
ated being on the principle by which it is, and therefore comes under the category
of relation.”
94. Infra, chap. 4 (Irenaeus): “Creation and Fabrication.”
95. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans.
Alfonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2002), 47, 48 (italics
added).
96. Ibid., 42 (emphasis added).
97. Marion, The Idol and Distance, 219.
98. See John Scotus Erigena, De la division de la nature (Periphyseon), bk. I,
465A.
99. John Scotus Erigena, Commentary on the Gospel of John (Paris: Cerf),
Sources Chrétiennes, vol. 180, ch. XXI, 298 A, p. 101.
Chapter 2
1. John Scotus Erigena, On the Division of Nature (Periphyseon). For the
Latin text used in this work, see the Patrologia Latina (PL, vol. 122) and for the
Expositiones in Ierarchiam Calestem, see the Corpus christianorum continuatio
medievalis (CCCM, 31) (Turhnolti: Brepols, 1975).
2. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996).
3. Erigena, On the Division of Nature, I, 446D.
4. This way is developed by Jean-Luc Marion in The Idol and Distance, 143:
“The name [in Denys] comes to us as unthinkable within the thinkable, because
the unthinkable in person delivers it to us, just as a perfect, unknown, and anony-
mous poem reveals all of the poet and conceals him infinitely. It is up to distance
to use the language that identifies it.”
5. See especially on this point and concerning this debate: Jacques Derrida,
“Sauf le nom: (Post-Scriptum),” in On the Name, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stan-
ford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 35–87 (completed by “How to
Avoid Speaking: Denials,” trans. Ken Frieden, in Languages of the Unsayable:
The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Sanford Budick and
Wofgang Iser [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987], 3–70); and Jean-
Luc Marion, “In the Name: How to Avoid Speaking of It,” in In Excess: Studies
of Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2002), 128–61.
6. Erigena, Expositiones in Ierarchiam caelestem, IV, 17.
7. Heidegger, Being and Time, § 7, pp. 24– 25: “The Greek expression
phainomenon, from which the term ‘phenomenon’ derives, comes from the verb
phainesthai, meaning ‘to show itself.’ Thus phainomenon means what shows
itself, the self-showing, the manifest. Phainesthai itself is a ‘middle voice’ con-
struction of phainô, to bring into daylight, to place in brightness. . . . Thus the
meaning of the expression ‘phenomenon’ is established as what shows itself in

itself, what is manifest.”
8. Etienne Gilson, La philosophie au Moyen Âge (Paris: Payot, 1947), 222.
9. Respectively, René Roques “Traduction ou interprétation ? Brèves remarques
sur Jean Scot traducteur de Denys,” in Libres sentiers ver l’erigenisme (Rome:
Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1975), 126; and Albert le Grand, In Phys., lib. I, tr. 1, c.1:
“nostra intentio est omnes dictas partes (physicam, metaphysicam, mathemati-
cam) facere Latinis intelligibiles.” Cited in Marie-Dominique Chenu, Introduction
à l’étude de saint Thomas d’Aquin, 5th ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1993), 36.
10. John Scotus Erigena, Areopagitica, Praef (preface to the translation of the
works of Denys), PL, 122, 1032 B-C.
11. Roques, “Traduction ou interpretation?” 99–130 (cit. 104). Concerning the
deviation between Erigena and Hilduin in the work of translating Denys, see G.
Théry’s very thorough study “Scot Érigène traducteur de Denys,” in Bulletin de
Cange 6 (1931): 1–94.
12. F. Bertin, in Erigena, De la division de la nature, bks. I and II (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1995), n. 17, p. 201.
13. I do not agree, in this sense, with Jean-Luc Marion: neither in postulating
that the work of the Greek fathers, and Denys in particular, “consists in liberating
Christian theological concepts from their Greek horizon,” since the influence of
Neoplatonism appears evident in the return of the epeikena tês ousias in Denys
(see “In the Name: How to Avoid Speaking of It,” In Excess), nor in holding dis-
tance as the unique and final word of negative theology insofar as it would accept
at the same time a certain proximity (cf. The Idol and Distance, §15, “Immediate
Mediation,” 162–79). However, the fact remains that the interpretation of Denys
in either case could not have led us anywhere but here. Only the negation of the
way of eminence by Erigena, substituting in its place the idea of a divine Nothing-
ness, will on the contrary be (as I will show) the unique way, on the one hand, to
render negative theology its Christian specificity (the manifestation of God and
the incarnation of the Word) and to give it, on the other hand, a reversal of trajec-
tory (no more toward the transcendence of God but into the immanence of man
and the world by theophany).
14. See chap. 2 (infra): “The Nihilation of Eminence.”
15. Roques, “Traduction ou interpretation?” 127.
16. John Scotus Erigena, Versio operum S. Dionysii, in PL 122, 1035A–1036A.
The expression of “negative theology” is in reality not found in Denys himself,
and, much like the word “proof” in Aquinas, he never speaks of negative theol-
ogy but only of a “negative (or apophatic) way.” The application of the terms
negative and affirmative way to the “theological discipline” explicitly enacted
here by Erigena prejudges nothing of the content of these doctrines. It marks
nevertheless a decisive advance toward the exemplifications of a “negative theol-
ogy” formula—which “is nothing but very modern” (see Jean-Luc Marion, In
Excess, 129–30).
17. Denys the Areopagite, Mystical Theology, V, 1048 A (in Pseudo-Dionysius:
The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem [Mahwah, N.J.:
Paulist, 1987], 141): “Again, we climb even higher than this. It is not soul or
mind, nor does it possess imagination, conviction, speech or understanding . . . It
cannot be grasped by the understanding since it is neither knowledge or truth . . .
It falls neither within the predicate of nonbeing nor of being . . . There is no

speaking of it, nor name nor knowledge of it.”
18. See Boethius, Contre Eutychès et Nestorius, in Courts traits de théologie
(Paris : Le Cerf, 1991), chap. 1, pp. 53–54; see F. Bertin in Erigena, Periphyseon,
bk. I, n. 1, p. 190.
19. John Scotus Erigena, Periphysion, I, 441 A.
20. Bertin, in Erigena, De la division de la nature, bk. III, vol. 2, back cover.
21. A rigorous analysis of this imperious necessity of an exit from “the meta-
physics of presence” both in Husserl as in Heidegger can be found in Jean-Luc
Marion, Reduction and Givenness: trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1998). On Husserl, see 49–56 (“The ‘Phenom-
enon Reduced’ to Present Objectivity”), and on Heidegger see 56–61 (“From the
Unapparent Phenomenon to the ‘Phenomenon of Being’ ”). The author has more-
over drawn out of himself all the implications for negative theology in a heated
debate with J. Derrida, in In Excess, chapter 6 (“In the Name: How to Avoid
Speaking of It”), and in particular, p. 128, which fixes the perspective: “That the
two questions of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ and ‘negative theology’—questions
which to all appearances come from such dissimilar provenances—should today
end up encountering one another, indeed, end up being by and large superim-
posed, could be surprising.”
22. Denys the Areopagite, Mystical Theology, 1000 B, p. 136.
23. J.-C. Foussard, “Non apparentis apparitio: Le théophanies de Jean Scot
Érigène,” in Face de Dieu et théophanies: Cahiers de l’Université Saint-Jean de
Jérusalem 12 (1986): 120–48; citation p. 123. Jean-Claude Foussard, along with
Francis Bertin, are among the more important interpreters of Erigena in French,
neither of them wallowing in pure historicism. They heroically continue with
an important work, giving to Erigena the place which rightly belongs to him in
medieval philosophy.
24. Erigena, Periphyseon I, 482 A-B.
25. See Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being (1982), trans. Thomas A. Carl-
son (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 138.
26. Erigena, Periphyseon III, 680 D–681 A.
27. F. Bertin in Erigena, De la division de la nature, vol. 1, n. 62, p. 216 (rightly
cited in Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess, n. 3, p. 129). We should be grateful to René
Roques for having, since his earliest works, noted this slippage in the meaning
of the negative in Erigena. See “Jean Scot Érigène” in Dictionnaire de spiritualité
(Paris: Beauschesne, 1973), col. 741: “Jean Scot précise qu’on doit entendre aussi
de manière négative tous les superlatifs in ‘uper’ auxquels Denys recourt après
la double démarche de l’affirmation et de la négation, et que les interprètes des
Noms divins ont souvent expliques dans un sens positif” (italics mine).
28. Erigena, Periphyseon I, 462 C.
29. Roques, “Jean Scot Érigène.” For a more developed thematization of this
radicalization of Denys in the meaning of the negative, see also Roques’s “Tra-
duction ou interprétation?” 127; as well as, in the same work (Libres sentiers ver
l’erigenisme): “Tératologie et théologie in Jean Scot Érigène,” 13–43, a thesis on
the excess of dissemblance over resemblance.
30. I recall here of course the title of the project of Emmanuel Levinas, Other-
wise Than Being or Beyond Essence.
31. John Scotus Erigena, Expositiones in Ierarchiam caelestem (CCCM 37), IV,
1, lines 72–78. Cited and translated by F. Bertin in Erigena, De la division de la
nature, I–II, n. 1, p. 94.
32. F. Bertin in Erigena, De la division de la nature, bk. I and bk. II, introduc-
tion, p. 39.
33. Marion, Reduction and Givenness, 2.
34. Respectively, Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion, II, 2; and Thomas Aqui-
nas, Summa Theologiae, Ia q. 1 a. 8 ad. 2.
35. Erigena, Periphyseon, II, 589 B. The French here is borrowed from the
translation of J. Jolivet’s monograph on Erigena, Histoire de la philosophie: La
philosophie médiévale (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), vol. 1, p. 1255. I offer my thanks
to this interpreter, specifically for putting me on the trail of Erigenism by virtue of
this very formula that I have borrowed from him. Bertin’s French translation runs
thus: Dieu ne se connaît donc pas dans sa quiddité, car Dieu n’est pas un quid
objectivé (“God does not know himself in his quiddity, for he is not an objective
quid”; Erigena, De la divisione de la nature, 375). Despite the immense merit
of his work, on this point it seems too far removed from the letter of the text to
draw out adequately its specificity.
36. Jean-Claude Foussard, “Non apparentis apparitio: Le théophanisme de
Jean Scot Érigène,” 122 (italics added). Concerning the meaning and the necessity
of such a “reduction” or epochê of the divine quid, see my work, Saint Bonaven-
ture et l’entrée de Dieu en théologie, § 4, pp. 55–63: “La Fin de L’Empire du ti
esti” (quid, quis, quomodo).
37. (Apérité is the French neologism to translate Heidegger’s Offenständigkeit,
which is translated into English as “openness,” “being open,” or “standing open,”
etc. –Trans.)
38. Heidegger, Being and Time, §9, p. 40 and §2, p. 5, respectively.
39. See Marion, Reduction and Givenness, “The Hermeneutics of Nothing as
Being,” 176–81.
40. Erigena, Periphyseon, II, 589 B. Note that the term “quiddity” is not yet
fixed in the Carolingian epoch and so its employment to translate “that which is”
(quid sit) is misguided. One cannot therefore reduce the question of the being-
ness (étantité) of God to his essentiality (essentialité) without anachronism. See J.
Jolivet, Histoire de la philosophie, vol. 1, p. 1255.
41. See Meister Eckhart, “Sermon 71”: “ ‘When Paul is raised from the earth,
his eyes are opened and he sees nothing’ (Ac. 9:8). Nothing (das Nichts): this was
God.” We will return to this in the following chapter.
42. Erigena, Periphyseon, II, 589 B-C.
43. Ibid., II, 589 B.
44. Erigena, Versio Maximi, praef., 1196 A–B. Cited and translated by M. Cap-
puyns, Jean Scotus Érigène: Sa vie, son oeuvre, sa pensée (Louvain, Belg.: Abbaye
de Mont César, 1933), 323.
45. Erigena, Periphyseon, II, 585 B.
46. Heidegger, Being and Time, § 2, p. 25.
47. For the definition of Dasein as “being-there” distinct from that which is
both “subsistent” (vorhanden) and “available” (zuhanden) see Heidegger, Being
and Time, § 12. Concerning the meaning of Erigenian apophaticism, both as “neg-
ative theology” (humanity unable to know God) and “negative anthropology”
(humanity unable to know humanity), see Bernard McGinn’s profitable article

“The Negative Element in the Anthropology of John the Scot,” in Jean Scot Éri-
gène et l’histoire de la philosophie, ed. R. Roques (Paris: Centre national de la
recherche scientifique, 1977), 315–25.
48. F. Bertin, “Les origines de l’homme chez Jean Scot,” in Roques, Jean Scot
Érigène et l’histoire de la philosophie, 307–14 (citation 308–9).
49. Erigena, Periphyseon, I, 446 D.
50. Heidegger, Being and Time, § 7: “The Concept of the Logos,” p. 28. See
Aristotle, De Interpretatione, 4, 17 a 3–7 (Complete Works, vol. 1, p. 26): “Every
sentence is significant (not as a tool but, as we said, by convention), but not every
sentence is a statement-making sentence, but only those in which there is truth
or falsity. There is not truth or falsity in all sentences: prayer is a sentence but it
is neither true nor false.”
51. Denys the Areopagite, Mystical Theology, 1025 B, p. 138. “For this would be
really to see and to know: to praise the Transcendent One in a transcending way,
namely through the denial of all beings. We would be like sculptors who set out to
carve a statue. They remove every obstacle to the pure view of the hidden image,
and simply by this act of clearing aside they show up the beauty which is hidden.”
52. Erigena, Periphyseon, III, 665 D. “The original nature of creatures has
always existed in an inalterable way in the Wisdom of God . . . ; but since their
original nature is knowable only by God . . . , and since no created understanding
has ever been able to know it in its own essence until now, the original nature
of creatures began to exist by means of a generation in time, acquiring some
quantitative and qualitative properties, in which it is thus able, under a sort of
vestment [veluti quibusdam vestimentis], to reveal implicitly its existence [operta
postest manifestare quia est], but not at all its essence [non autem quid sit].” J.-C.
Foussard rightly indicates this notion of the vestment as paradigm of the hidden
and revealed in Erigena: “Non apparentis apparitio . . . ,” 128. I will return to
this exemplary confirmation of this Erigenian model of unveiling rather than of
stripping bare in the constant passage from the hidden to the “secrets of nature”
(arcanum, mysterium, secretum), when I discuss (infra) the manifest or revealed
in the intelligible and sensible realms of created beings (theophany). See E. Jeau-
neau, “Le cache et l’obscur (quatre thèmes érigéniens),” in Etudes érigéniennes
(Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1987), 221–42.
53. Heideggerian definition of “the preliminary concept of phenomenology,”
Being and Time, § 7, p. 30.
54. Heidegger, Being and Time. See the passage from § 6 (“the task of a
destruction of the history of ontology”) to § 7 (“the phenomenological method
of research”).
55. See Heidegger, Being and Time, § 6, p. 21: “If the question of being is to
achieve clarity regarding its own history, a loosening of the sclerotic tradition
and a dissolving of the concealments produced by it is necessary. We understand
this task as the destructuring of the traditional content of ancient ontology.”
The French translation of “Destruction” (Martineau), translated also by “dé-
construction” (Granel) or “désobstruction” (Vezin) thus takes leave of the false
idea of the annihilation of the history of philosophy where it would be first a mat-
ter of its appropriation. See Jean Greisch, Ontologie et temporalité (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1994), 98.
56. John Scotus Erigena, Expositiones en Ierarchiam caelestem, II, 3, lines 526–27.
57. Erigena, Periphyseon, I, 464 A.
58. Ibid., I, 482 A-B.
59. René Roques, “Traduction ou interprétation ? Brèves remarques sur Jean
Scot traducteur de Denys,” in Libres sentiers vers l’érigénisme, 127.
60. Erigena, Periphyseon, I, 465 A.
61. Ibid., I, 504 B.
62. Ibid., I, 508 B.
63. See Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being, 106. See on this point the just
retractions the author himself made concerning the possibility of the attribution
of the Thomist esse to a “God without Being” who is not, for all that, a “God
with being.” Jean-Luc Marion, “Saint Thomas Aquinas and Onto-theology” in
Mystics, 38–73. Marion’s famous “retraction” is edited out of the revised English
text. See “Saint Thomas d’Aquin et l’ontotheologie,” Revue thomiste (January-
March 1995): 31–66, n. 82, p. 65: “Such was my position, notably in God
without Being. It is now clear that I ought today to present a retraction on this
point, and I happily do so: for Thomas Aquinas himself, another view should
be envisaged—that of thinking being starting from the unknowability of God,
directly and without intermediary of any other name (even the Good) but even
so no less radically.”
65. Erigena, Periphyseon, respectively I, 463 B and III, 687 A.
66. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 2, “Fifth Investigation,” § 8, p. 550:
“If the peculiar character of intentional experience is contested, if one refuses to
admit, what for us is most certain, that being-an-object consists phenomenologi-
cally in certain acts in which something appears, or is thought of as our object, it
will not be intelligible how being-an-object can itself be objective for us.”
67. Erigena, Periphyseon, I, 452 B-C.
68. Ibid., I, 452.
69. For this famous division of nature that structures the entire Periphyseon
and upon which we will not comment any further since it is amply explicated
by a number of Erigenian exegetes, we refer only to the opening of the text, I,
441. See also the introduction to F. Bertin’s French translation which traces this
structure, 37–39.
70. Erigena, Periphyseon, I 445, D.
71. Ibid., III, 678 C.
72. Foussard, “Non apparentis apparitio . . . ,” Cahiers de l’Université Saint-
Jean de Jérusalem 12: 124.
73. Erigena, Periphyseon, I, 454 A–454 B.
74. Ibid., I 454 C.
75. Ibid., I, 455 B. On the meaning of this “divine auto-creation” as “auto-
manifestation” and its impossible reduction to a facile pantheism, see the very
good article of J.-C. Foussard, “Non apparentis apparitio . . . ,” 120–48, and
especially 123–28.
76. Ibid., III, 678 B.
77. Henri Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme (Indianap-
olis, Ind.: Hackett, 1999): “To philosophize, therefore, is to invert the habitual
direction of the work of thought . . . Modern mathematics is precisely an effort
to substitute the being made for the ready-made, to follow the generation of mag-
nitudes, to grasp motion, no longer from without and in its displayed result, but
from within and in its tendency to change; in short to adopt the mobile continuity
of the outlines of things.”
78. It is probably with Bonaventure that all the Trinitarian consequences of
such a view were drawn out before its usage in the metaphysics of Leibniz. On
this point see my work Saint Bonaventure et l’entrée de Dieu en théologie, 75–78:
“L’hypothèse monadologique.”
79. Erigena, Periphyseon, III, 677 B.
80. Ibid., I, 459 D—460 A.
81. Roques, “Scot Érigène,” Dictionnaire de spiritualité, 741–42.
82. Ibid., I, 452, C.
83. Ibid., III, 643 B.
84. Ibid., I, 442 B.
85. Ibid., III, 642 D.
86. On this point, see my work Saint Bonaventure et l’entrée de Dieu en théol-
ogie, § 6, pp. 83–90: “De la sortie de la métaphysique à la Trinite créatrice.”
87. Erigena, Periphyseon, I, 452 D.
88. Ibid., I, 453 A.
89. Ibid., I, 453 B. This theme will be taken up again by Bonaventure in rela-
tion to the angels in Breviloquium, II, 8, 2 (V, 226 a). See Saint Bonaventure et
l’entrée de Dieu en théologie, 88.
90. Erigena, Periphyseon, I, 460 A. “But if you have recourse to the other ety-
mological origin of this name, which would conceive theos, God, as not at all
deriving from the verb theôrô, I see, but from the verb theô, I run, you will be
confronted by the same rule. Because the one who runs is opposed to the one
who does not run, as slowness is opposed to swiftness. God will therefore be
upertheos [sic], more than runs [plusquam currens].”
91. I refer here to the work of J. Miernowski, Le Dieu néant: Théologies néga-
tives à l’aube des temps modernes (Leiden, Neth.: Editions Brill, 1998), chap. II,
pp. 22–38 (“Vaincre la dissimiliarité par l’analogie” [Aquinas]), and chap. III, pp.
39–53 (“Vaincre la dissimilarité par l’amour” [Ficino]).
92. Erigena, Expositiones in Ierarchiam caelestem, IV, 17.
93. Even though it could be discerned already in § 7 of Being and Time, the
expression “phenomenology of the inapparent” is a very late formulation in Hei-
degger, from the “Zähringen Seminar” [1973], in Heidegger, Four Seminars, trans.
Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington Indiana: Indiana University
Press, 2003), pp. 64–83.
94. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, § 7, pp. 25 and 31, respectively.
95. Erigena, Periphyseon, I, 446 D p.: “It is not only the divine essence [non
enim essentia divina] which the word God connotes; but this mode [modus ille]
under which God shows himself [ostendit] to the intellectual and rational crea-
ture . . . which is frequently also called God by holy Scripture. The Greeks used
to call this mode a theophany [theophania], that is to say an appearance of God
[hoc est Dei apparitio]. Here is an example of this theophany: ‘I saw the Lord
seated’ (Is. 6:1), and other analogous formulae, since it is not the Essence of God
[non ipsius essentiam] that the prophet saw, but a theophany created by Him [sed
aliquid ab eo factum].”
96. Ibid., III, 633 A–633 B. We should be grateful, first to Hans Urs von
Balthasar, and then to Jean-Claude Foussard for having brought to light this
structure of phenomenalization proper to Erigena, even though neither of them
explicitly drew out the consequences for phenomenology itself. See, respectively,
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 4: The Realm of Metaphysics
in Antiquity, trans. Oliver Davies et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989), 343–
55; and Jean-Claude Foussard, “Non apparentis apparitio: Le théophanisme de
Jean Scot Érigène,” (Cahiers de l’Université Saint-Jean de Jérusalem 12), 120–48.
The translation of non apparentis apparitio as “appearance of the one who does
not appear (or “is inapparent”)” is borrowed from Foussard. The translation by
“appearance of what is non apparent” (F. Bertin) leaves too neutral, it seems to
me, the very One (God) who is called to appear.
97. Erigena, Periphyseon, I, 449 C. On the famous tri-partition of the phe-
nomenon mentioned here (Offenbarung/Schein/Ershceinung), see Heidegger,
Being and Time, § 7 (“The Concept of the Phenomenon”), pp. 23–8. See also the
commentary of Jean Greisch, Ontologie et temporalité: Esquisse d’une interpré-
tation intégrale de Sein und Zeit (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France), 102–4:
“Qu’est-ce qu’un phénomène?”
98. Erigena, Commentarius in evangelium Iohannis, I, XXV, 301 D–302 B. See
the complementary note of F. Bertin in Erigena, De la division de la nature, vol.
1, n. 17, pp. 201–2.
99. Erigena, Commentarius in evangelium Iohannis, 302 B: “Similarly, per-
fectly purified souls or the intelligences (angelic) are theophanies [thophaniae
sunt]; in them, God manifests himself to those who seek him and love him.”
101. Erigena, Periphyseon IV, 760 A. “In its totality human nature subsists in
the totality of all created natures, because in it all creatures have been constituted
(under a synthetic mode) . . . , and by it all creatures will be saved.” It is appro-
priate to retain the Latin vocabulary of “constitution” (constituta) instead of
translating it as “création” (F. Bertin), in order not to lose the properly phenom-
enological vision of Erigena here.
102. Erigena, Omelia Iohannis . . . , ch. XIX, 294 A–294 B.
103. Erigena, Periphyseon, II, 536 B. On this central theme of the human medi-
ator as fully involved in the manifestation of God, see the very profitable article
of F. Bertin, “Les origines de l’homme chez Jean Scot,” in Jean Scot Érigène et
l’histoire de la philosophie (Centre national de la recherche scientique, 1977),
307–14, particularly 308: “L’homme theophanique.”
104. Erigena, Periphyseon, III, 733 B.
105. The theme of the creation of “primordial man,” even before Adam is
named, was inherited from Gregory of Nyssa (De imagine, 185 B). See F. Bertin,
“Les origines de l’homme chez Jean Scot” (in Jean Scot Érigène et l’histoire de la
philosophie), 307–14 (theme of the “Manence de l’homme,” 307); as well as J.
Trouillard, “La notion de théophanie chez Érigène,” in Manifestation et révéla-
tion, Revue de l’Institut Catholique de Paris (Paris: Beauschesne, 1976), 15–39
and “L’unité humaine selon Jean Scot Érigène,” in L’homme et son prochain
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1956), 298–301.
106. Erigena, Periphyseon, V, 1021 B. For this Erigenian if also phenomeno-
logical design of eschatology, see respectively, Jean-Claude Foussard, “Apparence
et apparitio: La notion de ‘phantasia’ chez Jean Scot Érigène” (in Jean Scot Éri-
gène et l’histoire de la philosophie, 337–48) and T. Gregory, “L’eschatologie de
Jean Scot,” 377–92.
107. Heidegger, Being and Time, § 7, p. 31: “The phenomenological concept of
the phenomenon, as self-showing, means the being of beings.”
108. Erigena, Periphyseon, I, 450 C.
109. Ibid., V, 905 B–905 C.
110. See E. Jeauneau, “Le symbolisme de la mer chez Jean Scot Érigène,” in Études
érigéniennes, 289–96: “The sea is not here that perfidious element that Augustine
was often describing. It evokes the mystery of the immensity of God” (389).
111. Quoted in X. Lacroix, Le corps de chair (Paris: Le Cerf, 1994), 236.
112. Erigena, Periphyseon, I, 445 C– 445 D. The phenomenological estab-
lishment of the structure of the call as a “third reduction” after Husserl and
Heidegger can be found in Jean-Luc Marion, Reduction and Givenness, chap. IV,
§ 6, pp. 167–202.
113. Erigena, Commentary on the Gospel of John, XXI, 298 A.
114. Ibid., XXV 300 D.
115. Erigena, Periphyseon, V, 926 C–926 D. On the face-to-face divine-human
irreducibility of the visage, see Jean-Claude Foussard, “La notion de phantasia
chez Jean Scot” (in Jean Scot Érigène et l’histoire de la philosophie, 346–48).
116. Erigena, Commentary on the Gospel of John, chap. XXVII, 304 D–305 A.
On the meaning of such a “phenomenology of the cry” in Christianity, as a “cry
of the flesh”—supremely from the cross, see my work Le passeur de Gethsémani,
Angoisse, souffrance et mort: Lecture existentielle et phénoménologique (Paris:
Le Cerf, 1999), 157–60: “L’excès du corps souffrant.”
117. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: Seeing the Form, 464.
Chapter 3
1. On this distinction, see my essay “Tuilage et conversion de la philosophie
par la théologie,” in Philosophie et théologie, 1996–2006, ed. Falque and Lielin-
ski (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005), 45–56. See also my remarks on the Wojtylian
usage of the word “phenomenology” in “Ecce Homo: Voici l’homme,” in Jean-
Paul II et la culture contemporaine (Paris: Le Cerf, 2005), 157–86. The point is
clear: the use of the term “phenomenology” in the context of theology is princi-
pally and exclusively referred to as a collection of descriptive phenomena—in a
tradition running from the Phenomenology of Spirit of Hegel to the Truth of the
World of Hans Urs von Balthasar (the French title, Phénoménologie de la vérité,
will be discussed). By contrast, phenomenology, when it is a matter of the mode
of thought founded by Husserl, is always based on the method called “reduc-
tion.” In this sense, as far as I can see, there is no phenomenology independent of
such an epochê, however the term is elsewhere used.
2. Meister Eckhart, “Sermon 52,” in Du Détachement et autres textes, trans. G.
Jarczyk and P.-J. Labarrière (Paris: Rivages, 1995), 56. [Falque takes quotations
from, and often subtly revises, various French translations of Eckhart’s works.
His selection is based on the translation’s “availability” and especially its “philo-
sophical conceptuality” (see fn. 1, p. 138, of original text). I continue the practice
from previous chapters of translating Falque’s French quotation of the chap-
ter’s primary sources directly, and without reference to equivalent, contemporary
English editions (unless otherwise noted). Usually, Falque utilizes Du Détache-

ment et autres textes, trans. G. Jarczyk et P.-J. Labarrière (Paris: Rivages, 1995)
for Sermons 52 and 71 (henceforth, Dét.), and Le château de l’âme, trans. Jarczyk
and Labarrière (Paris: Carnets Desclée de Brouwer, 1995), for Sermons 2 and 86
(henceforth, Chât.) –Trans.] For key texts of reference in French, see Meister Eck-
hart, Sermons, trans. J. Ancelet-Hustache (Paris: Seuil, 1974 [vol. 1], 1978 [vol.
2], 1979 [vol. 3]); Oeuvres de Meister Eckhart: Sermons-traités, trans. P. Petit
(Paris: Gallimard, 1942) (henceforth, Gal.); Meister Eckhart, Traités et sermons,
trans. Alain de Libera (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1995) (henceforth, GF); and
La mystique rhénane d’Albert le Grand à Maitre Eckhart (Paris: OEIL, 1983),
chap. 4, pp. 231–316 (this is probably the best introduction to the work of Eck-
hart available in French).
3. See respectively, Martin Heidegger, “Philosophical Foundations for Medieval
Mysticism,” in The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and
Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004),
231–54; and Michel Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, trans. Girard Etzkorn
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), § 49, pp. 424–37 (quotation p. 427).
4. Concerning this, one should read the luminous work of S. Bongiovanni,
“Phénoménologie et mystique spéculative: Edmond Husserl et Maitre Eckhart:
De la réduction au ‘je’ a la réduction du ‘je,’ ” in L’anneau immobile: Regards
croises sur Maitre Eckhart: Husserl, Hegel, Laozi, ed. S. Bongiovanni, G. Jarc-
zuk, P.-J. Labarriere, and B. Vermander (Paris: Ed. des Facultés Jésuites de Paris,
2005), 18–58. This volume appeared unfortunately after the redaction of the
present chapter. It confirms the pertinence of the link established here (Husserl-
Eckhart) though I regret not being able to further dialogue with this text. If the
perspectives are the same (reduction and conversion), the means of establishing
the position are radically different. I focus principally on a reading of the ser-
mons on Martha and Mary (Sermons 2 and 86). Bongiovanni, on the other hand,
focuses on Sermon 52: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” (However, I do comment
on this sermon briefly below.)
5. See Edmund Husserl, Nachwort (1930), “Afterword to My Ideas Pertaining
to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy,” in Ideas Per-
taining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First
Book, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (The Hague: Springer, 1990). This call
for a new phenomenological praxis begins with Husserl and despite a relation to
theology needing redefinition, appears in Natalie Depraz, Husserl (Paris: Armand
Colin, 1999), 86–88. See also H. Spielberg, Doing Phenomenology: Essays on
and in Phenomenology (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975).
6. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phe-
nomenology, 37.
7. Dorion Cairns, Conversations with Husserl and Fink (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1976), 91. Cited with commentary in Natalie Depraz, “Seeking Phenom-
enological Metaphysics: Henry’s Reference to Eckhart,” trans. Gregory B. Sadler,
Continental Philosophy Review 32 (1999): 303.
8. E. de Miribel, Comme l’or purifie par le feu, Edith Stein (1891–1942) (Paris:
Plon, 1984), 119: “The life of man is nothing other than a path toward God. I
have attempted to get through to the end without the help of theology, its proofs
and methods; in other words, I have wanted to attain God without God. It was
necessary for me to eliminate God from my scientific thought in order to open

the way to those who do not know, as you do, the sure route of faith that passes
by the Church . . . I am aware of the danger that accompanies such a process and
of the risk that I have myself incurred, if I did not feel so profoundly tied to God
and a Christian at the root of my heart” (emphasis added).
9. Edmund Husserl, “Manuscript of 1933,” in Husserliana 7, p. 9. Discussed
in Jocelyn Benoist, “Husserl: Au- delà de l’ontologie,” Études philosophiques
(October-December 1991): 433.
10. Husserl, The Crisis, 297; Eckhart, “Du Dét.,” Gal., p. 20. The parallelism
between Husserl and Eckhart is established in Depraz’s presentation on the text
of the Crisis (309).
11. Husserl, respectively, Ideas I, §32, p. 61; Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §
12, p. 27; “Afterword to My Ideas . . . ,” 216.
12. Husserl, Ideas I, § 57, p. 133, and § 58, p. 134.
13. Emmanuel Levinas, Discovering Existence with Husserl, trans. Richard
A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press,
1998), 83: “It is very difficult to take seriously the brief indications Husserl gives
about God in the Ideas, seeking, in the marvelous success of the play of intentions
constituting a coherent world, a teleological proof for the existence of God.”
14. See Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Essay on the Phenomenology of Given-
ness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002),
23–27.
15. Husserl, Ideas I, § 57, p. 133.
16. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §11, p. 26: “This ‘transcendence’ is part
of the intrinsic sense of anything worldly, despite the fact that anything worldly
necessarily acquires all the sense determining it, along with its existential status,
exclusively from my experiencing, my objectivating, thinking valuing, or doing,
at particular times.”
17. Edith Stein, “Husserl and Aquinas: A Comparison” (1929), in Knowledge
and Faith, ed. Walter Redmond (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies,
2000), 32.
18. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §16, p. 38.
19. A. Löwith, “L’epochê de Husserl et le doute de Descartes,” in Revue de
métaphysique et de morale (October-December 1957): note 4, p. 407.
20. John XXIII, Opening of Vatican Council II (Oct. 1, 1962), S. Oec. Conc.
Vat. II, Constitutiones Decreta Declarationes (1974), 863–65.
21. Eckhart, Sermon 4, GF, n. 703. See Gal. 243.
22. It is hardly necessary here to recall the following point, except for neo-
phytes: egocentric philosophy as a return toward the I or the ego (Descartes, but
also Eckhart and Augustine before him) has nothing to do with the egoism which
refuses all alterity, and so on.
23. Eckhart, Entretiens spirituels (Talks of Instruction), GF, p. 80.
24. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, § 39, p. 310: “The existential union
of man and God is only possible on the ground of their ontological unity . . . The
radical independence of man with regard to the whole of divine creation and to
God himself signifies his identity with him.”
25. P.-J. Labarrière (and G. Jarczyk), in Meister Eckhart, Le château de l’âme,
p. 37: “Meister Eckhart reveals here the profundity and intransigence of what
one could call his articulated monism . . . : ‘one becomes two; the two are one,
light and spirit; the two are enveloped in eternal light’ ” (citing Eckhart, “Sermon
86”).
26. Eckhart, Commentaire sur le prologue de Jean (Commentary on the Pro-
logue of St. John), in L’oeuvre latine de Maître Eckhart (Paris: Cerf, 1988), vol.
6, n. 2, p. 27: “By explaining these words and the others that follow, the author’s
purpose [Eckhart is speaking of himself], as in all of his writings, is to explain the
affirmations of the holy Christian faith and of Scripture in the two testaments by
means of the natural reason of the philosophers.”
27. Taken up again in Labarrière and Jarczyk’s collection. On this point, even
though it does not make mention of this possible phenomenological interpreta-
tion of the episode, see the instructive article of M. de Gandillac, “Deux figures
eckhartiennes de Marthe,” in Métaphysique: Histoire de la philosophie: Recueil
d’études offert à Fernand Brunner (Neuchâtel, 1981), 119–34.
28. Eckhart, “Sermon 86,” Chât. 69.
30. Eckhart, Instructional Talks, GF 78.
32. Eckhart, “Sermon 86,” Gal., 246. I prefer here the French translation of P.
Petit over that of P.-J. Labarrière (Chât. 71), insofar as the metaphor of “being
stuck in the mud” [embourbement] makes clearer this danger of pure absorption
in God without detachment.
33. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, § 15, p. 35.
34. Respectively, Eckhart, “Sermon 86,” Chât. 69; and Paul Ricoeur, “Intro-
duction,” Ideas I, trans. Paul Ricoeur (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), xx.
35. Ricœur, “Introduction,” Ideas I.
37. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, § 10, pp. 24–25.
38. Eckhart, “Sermon 5b,” GF 256.
39. Eckhart, “Sermon 86,” Chât. 73: “This is why he says: you concern your-
self (Lk. 10:41), and he means: you stand along with things and the things are
not in you; and they remain within worry who stand without being unfettered in
all their enterprises. They remain without fetters who orient all their work in the
ordained way after the image of the eternal light. These people stand with things,
not in things.”
40. Heidegger, Being and Time, § 41, pp. 178–83.
41. See J. Ancelet-Hustache’s French translation, “tu es vigilante (sorcsam)”
(you are watchful) in Eckhart, Sermons (Seuil), vol. 3, p. 174.
42. This is not the place to indicate some personal perspectives, independent of
Eckhart, which could well illustrate the point. For these see my work, Metamor-
phosis of Finitude: An Essay on Birth and Resurrection, trans. George Hughes
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), §17, pp. 67–76.
43. For this notion of “dwelling” (bauen) and its proximity to Eckhartian vigi-
lance “beside the world” rather than “worldly care” (besorgen), see Heidegger,
Being and Time, § 12, pp. 49–55. See also his “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,”
in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 1993),
319–39.
45. Eckhart, “Sermon 5b,” GF 255.

47. On the questions Henry poses to theology see my two contributions:
“Michel Henry théologien: A propos de C’est moi la vérité,” Laval théologique
et philosophique 57, no. 3 (October 2001): 525–36; as well as “Y-a-t-il une chair
sans corps? (autour de l’ouvrage de M. Henry, Incarnation, Paris, Seuil, 2000),”
in Phénoménologie et christianisme chez Michel Henry, ed. P. Capelle (2004),
95–133 (with response by Henry, 168–82).
48. P.-J. Labarrière, Le château d l’âme (Chât.), 39: “Only a third way—which
is called way and is nevertheless a home (Eckhart)—situates man at the heart of
the ultimate . . . All is drawn together in the temporal-eternal instant . . . Marvel-
ous is its bringing together of all interiority and exteriority, all active and passive
comprehension” (emphasis added).
49. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 282: “The very speech wherein all
things are contained, name and appellation, that which designates and that which
shows, these must also be renounced in this poverty which is made of silence”
(emphasis added).
51. Eckhart, “Sermon 2.” In this sermon Eckhart clearly distinguishes this
“something elevated beyond here or there” (the spark of the soul in “Sermon
48”) from the intellect as well as from the will (which he treats respectively). On
this point see the instructive notes of Alain de Libera on this sermon, in Traites et
sermons, GF, n. 26, p. 420, and n. 29, p. 421; as well as “Sermon allemand 77”
in Philosophes médiévaux des XIIIe et XIVe siècles, ed. R. Imbach and M.-H.
Meleard (Paris, 1986), 271–79.
52. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, § 11, p. 25–26.
53. Ibid.
54. Eckhart, “Sermon 17,” in Sermons, Seuil vol. 1, p. 156.
55. Ibid, p. 155 (implicitly citing Avicenne).
56. One should consult on this point the instructive article of B. Mojsisch, “Ce
moi: La conception de moi de maître Eckhart: Une contribution aux lumières du
Moyen Age,” in Revue des sciences religieuses 70, no. 1 (January 1996): 18–30.
See in particular p. 22 for the opposition of Eckhart to Aquinas and p. 23 for the
original birth of self-consciousness in Eckhart.
57. Eckhart, On Detachment, Dét. 50.
59. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, IIa, IIae, q. 182, a. 1, resp.: “The
contemplative life is concerned with the divine; the active life is concerned with
the human: ‘In the beginning was the Word’ writes St. Augustine, ‘behold that
which Mary heard. The Word made flesh: behold that which Martha served.’ ”
62. Ibid., p. 85.
64. Infra, chap. 4 (Irenaeus), “The Visibility of the Flesh.”
65. Eckhart, “Sermon 52,” Dét. 56.
66. Eckhart, “Sermon 29,” GF 328. And, respectively, Alain de Libera, “L’un
ou la trinité ?” in Les mystiques rhénans: Revue des sciences religieuses (January
1996): 31–47; J. Lerfert, “Les cieux changent et le étoiles filent: Poétique trinitaire
de Maitre Eckhart,” Nouvelle revue théologique (January-March 2004): 86–105
(quotation p. 90).
68. Angelus Silesius, Le pèlerine chérubinique [The Cherubinic Wanderer]
(Paris: Aubier, 1946), vol. 1, pp. 61–62.
70. Eckhart, “Sermon 2, ” Chât. 59.
71. See Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, § 15, p. 35: “Above the I naively
interested in the world will be established a disinterested onlooker, the phenom-
enological I.”
73. Ibid., p. 73.
74. Ibid.
75. Ibid., p. 74.
76. Eckhart, On Detachment, Dét. 49–50.
78. See Etienne Gilson, Le thomisme (Paris: Vrin, 1983): “Thomist philoso-
phy . . . is constituted in opposition to every doctrine which would not confer to
secondary causes the complete measure of being and the efficacy to which they
have the right.”
80. Eckhart, respectively, “Sermon 5b” and “Sermon 6,” GF 255 and 262.
81. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, § 49, p. 432.
82. Eckhart, “Sermon 29,” GF 330.
83. F. Bruner, Maître Eckhart: Approche de l’oeuvre (Geneva: Ad Solem, 1999),
74–75 (emphasis added).
84. Bull of John XXII, In agro dominico (March 27, 1329). Condemnations 10
and 22, respectively; reproduced in GF 410 and 412.
85. See my Saint Bonaventure et l’entrée de Dieu en théologie, §10, pp. 137–49.
87. Bull of John XXII, GF, condemnation 13, pp. 410–11.
88. In this sense, we should wonder whether certain revivals of Eckhart today
do not take the path of the “de-theologization” of medieval philosophy that I
have interrogated in the introduction, above.
90. See Eckhart, “Sermon 12,” GF 297; as well as the commentary of B. Moj-
sisch, “Ce Moi: La conception du Moi de Maître Eckhart,” 18–30: “Each man
possesses in himself a unique something in the soul which is not the soul itself but
its ground or origin. It is toward this something that the possible intellect ought
to be turned in order to be surpassed as an I in this something” (p. 22, emphasis
in original).
94. Ibid.
97. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1992), 3 (emphasis added).
98. Ibid., “Sermon 14,” GF 310.
99. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, § 37, pp. 76–77: “The phenomenology
developed at first is merely static; its descriptions are analogous to those of natu-
ral history, which concern particular types and, at best, arrange them in their
systematic order. Questions of universal genesis and the genetic structure of the
ego in his universality, so far as that structure is more than temporal formation,
are still far away” (emphasis added).
100. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, § 38, p. 77.
102. Ibid., 51–52.
103. Ibid., 53.
104. Eckhart, “Sermon 43,” Seuil, vol. 2, p. 85.
106. See Plato, Theaetetus, 150b, in Complete Works, p. 167: “Now my art of
midwifery [maieutikê] is just like theirs in most respects. The difference is that I
attend men and not women, and that I watch over the labor of their souls and
not of their bodies.”
107. Bull of John XXII, condemnation 13, GF 411.
108. Eckhart, “Sermon 83,” Seuil, vol. 3, p. 153. Concerning the status of the
subject in Eckhart and the meaning accorded to this identification of egos, see
the very instructive chapter of Alain de Libera in La mystique rhénane, D’Albert
le Grand à Maître Eckhart (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 231–316, and especially 238–50.
110. Eckhart, quoted by Emilie Zum Brunn, “Un homme qui pâtit Dieu,” in
Voici Maître Eckhart (Grenoble: Jérome Millon, 1994), 269 (referring to F. Pfeifer,
Deutsch Mystiker des vierzehnten Jahrunderts, vol. 2, Meister Eckhart, 337).
111. Eckhart, “Sermon 2,” Chât. 60–61: “Jesus went to a little fortress and was
received by a virgin who was a woman. Why? (1) It was necessary for her to be
a virgin and a woman. (2) Now I told you that Jesus was received. (3) But I have
not yet spoken about the little fortress, about which I am about to speak.” Only
the second point remains to be studied here.
113. Eckhart, Book of Divine Comfort, in The Complete Mystical Works of
Meister Eckhart, trans. Maurice Walshe and Bernard McGinn (New York: Cross-
roads, 2010), 547. In this sense we could be tempted to see a quasi-precursor to
Moltmann’s theology of the cross (outside of his Trinitarian scheme, however),
distinguishing, on the one hand, the “suffering of the Son,” and on the other hand,
“the suffering of the Father undergoing the suffering of the Son.” See Jurgen Molt-
mann, The Crucified God, 243: “The suffering and the dying of the Son, forsaken
by the Father, is another kind of suffering than the suffering of the Father in the
death of the Son. . . . The Son suffers dying, the Father suffers the death of the Son.”
114. Three positive aspects of suffering in Eckhart, summarized by J.-F. Mal-
herbe in Souffrir Dieu: La prédication de Maître Eckhart (Paris: Le Cerf, 1992), 37.
115. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1990). For a Christological and phe-
nomenological interpretation of suffering as “the impossibility of retreat” in the
relation of the Son to the Father, see my work Le passeur de Gethsémani: Ango-
isse, souffrance et mort, lecture existentielle et phénoménologique (Paris: Le Cerf,
1999), 119–74.
118. Eckhart, Le grain de sénevé, trans. A. de Libera (Paris: Arfuyen, 1996),
distich VII, p. 29.
122. Alain de Libera, Penser au Moyen Age (Paris: Le Seuil, 1991), 330.
123. To trace this relationship in its concrete steps, see Philippe Capelle’s
instructive article, “Heidegger et Maître Eckhart,” in Les mystiques rhénans:
Revue des sciences religieuses (January 1996): 113–24. See also John Caputo,
The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (New York: Fordham University
Press, 1986), chap. 4, pp. 140–217.
124. Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, trans. Bret W. Davis
(Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2010), 70 [translation of Gelas-
senheit modified from “releasement,” utilized by this English translation, to
“serenity.” –Trans.].
125. Jean Greisch, “La contrée de la sérénité et l’horizon de l’espérance,” in
Heidegger et la question de Dieu, ed. Richard Kearney and Joseph O’Leary (Paris:
Grasset, 1982), 181. See also Alain de Libera, in M. Eckhart, Traites et sermons,
n. 12, p. 189: “We cannot exclude the possibility that Heidegger has underesti-
mated the second dimension of gelâzenheit [as abandonment of the will itself].”
126. Greisch, “La contrée de la sérénité,” 183.
128. Ibid., p. 96.
129. Ibid., p. 93.
130. Heidegger, What Is Metaphysics? 100 and 103, respectively.
131. See Libera, La mystique rhénane, d’Albert le Grand à Maître Eckhart,
285.
133. Ibid., p. 96.
134. Ibid., p. 96. See Heidegger, Being and Time, §18, p. 82: “The first two
concepts of being (zuhanden and vorhanden) are categories and concern beings
unlike Dasein.”
135. Eckhart, “Sermon 71,” Det. 96.
136. Ibid., p. 93.
137. Ibid., p. 96.
138. Ibid., pp. 97–98.
139. See P.-J. Labarrière’s introduction to Eckhart’s Du détachement et autres
textes, 38.
140. See Heidegger, What Is Metaphysics? 101. Cf. also Marion’s triple com-
mentary, each time from a different perspective: God without Being, chap. 4, pp.
108–38; Reduction and Givenness, chap. 6, pp. 167–202 ; Being Given, §20, pp.
189–98.
142. Eckhart, “Sermon 23,” Seuil, vol. 1, p. 201.

143. See Libera’s translation, in La mystique rhénane, 285: “n’être de rien de
rien.”
144. Heidegger, What Is Metaphysics? 101.
145. Eckhart, “Sermon 71,” Dét. 94 and 98–99, respectively.
146. Eckhart, Treatise on Detachment, Dét. 51.
148. Ibid., pp. 100–101.
149. Ibid., p. 101.
150. Ibid.
151. Ibid. Let me point the reader toward the famous definition of the love of
God by Bernard of Clairvaux, Le traite de l’amour de Dieu (De diligendo Deo)
(Paris: Le Cerf, 1984), Sources chrétiennes, 393, p. 61: “modus diligendi Deum,
sine modo diligere.” See my interpretative hypothesis (without however this ref-
erence in Eckhart as an explicit source): “Expérience et empathie chez Bernard
de Clairvaux,” in Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques (October-
December 2005): 655–96.
153. Ibid., p. 75.
154. Ibid., p. 76.
155. Ibid., p. 75.
156. Ibid., p. 76.
157. Ibid.
158. Ibid., p. 75.
159. Ibid., p. 74.
161. Eckhart, “Sermon 52,” Dét., 79.
162. Ibid., p. 78.
163. Ibid.
164. Hadewijch Antwerp, Letter XIX, in Complete Works (Mahwah, N.J.:
Paulist, 1980), 89.
166. Ibid.
167. Ibid., p. 80.
168. Husserl, On the Phenomenology of Consciousness of Internal Time
(1893–1917), trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht, Neth.: Kluwer Academic,
1991), §36, p. 79.
170. Ibid.
171. [This phrase is in English in the original. –Trans.]
172. Eckhart, “Sermon 52,” Det. 82.
173. Ibid., pp. 82–83.
174. Ibid., p. 77. See my Metamorphosis of Finitude: An Essay on Birth and
Resurrection.
175. Eckhart, “Sermon 52,” Det. 84. Completed by “Sermon 29,” GF 328:
“Insofar as God breaks through in me, I break through in him.”
176. See my two contributions already cited above: “Michel Henry théologien:
A propos de C’est moi la vérité,” Laval théologique et philosophique 57, no. 3
(October 2001): 525–36; “Y a-t-il un chair sans corps?” in Philippe Capelle, Phé-
noménologie et christianisme chez Michel Henry (2004), 95–133, with responses
from Michel Henry, 168–82.
177. Eckhart, Commentary on the Gospel of John, Prologue, in Meister
Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense, trans.
Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist, 1981), 167.
Introduction to Part Two

1. See, respectively, Emmanuel Levinas, “A Man God,” in Entre Nous: Essays
on Thinking-of-the-Other,” trans. Michael B. Smith (London: Continuum,
2006), 50: “To solicit a thought thinking more than it thinks, the Infinite cannot
incarnate itself in a Desirable, cannot, being infinite, enclose itself in an end [in
this context Levinas mentions the “transubstantiation of the Creator into the
creature”]”; and Emmanuel Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” in Collected Philo-
sophical Papers, ed. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht, Neth.: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987),
106–7: “To be in the image of God does not mean to be an icon of God, but to
find oneself in his trace” (emphasis added). And for Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Evan-
ston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964): “And it is a little too much to
forget that Christianity is, among other things, the recognition of a mystery in
the relations of man and God, which stems precisely from the fact that the Chris-
tian God wants nothing to do with a vertical relation of subordination” (70–71;
emphasis added).
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, foreword to the 2nd ed. (1886). See
The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), 5. The translation by “flesh” and not “body” attested by Didier
Franck, Heidegger et le problème de l’espace (Paris: Minuit, 1986), 127.
3. [Cela même qui pense chez les homes est épanouissement de la chair (meleôn
phusis) en tous et en chacun], Parmenides, “Fragment 16,” trans. Didier Franck,
in Chair et corps: Sur la phénoménologie de Husserl (Paris: Minuit, 1981), 137,
n. 17. The fragment serves as the epigram of the entire work, p. 8.
4. See Martin Heidegger, “Plato’s Doctrine of the Truth,” trans. Thomas Shee-
han, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeil (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), 155–82; Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking, trans. J. Glenn
Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 113–244; “Logos: Heraclitus B 50”
in Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrel Krell (New York: Harper and Row,
1984), 61ff.; “Anaximander’s Sayings,” in Off the Beaten Track, ed. Julian Young
and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
242–81. See also Jean Greisch, “Le phénomène de la chair: Un ratage de Sein
und Zeit,” in G. Florival, ed. Dimension de l’exister, ed. G. Florival (Louvain-la-
Neuve: Etudes d’Anthropologie Philosophique, 1994), 157–74.
5. See Plato, Phaedrus, 250 d: “Only beauty has had this prerogative of being
capable of being manifest with the most force and which most attracts love.” See
the commentary of Jean-Louis Chrétien, L’effroi du Beau (Paris: Cerf, 1997), 60:
“Love is not a god, but the appearance of the divine in changeable beauty; in the
idea of the body, the same word designates the sensible and intelligible forms.”
6. See E. von Ivanka, Plato christanus: La réception critique de platonisme
chez le Peres de l’Eglise (1964; Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990),
8: “The utilization of the schemas of Platonic thought in a Christian context
harbors, for the elements that Christianity holds in a fundamental way, dangers
of caricature and deforming that a theological method formed by Aristotelianism
did not know.”
7. See on this point Heidegger’s critique (however unjustified) of Nietzsche:
“From the beginning, Nietzsche defined all his philosophy as the inversion of
Platonism,” in Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche vols 1–2, trans. David Farrell Krell
(NewYork: Harper Collins, 1991), 205.
Chapter 4
1. Porphyry, attested by Saint Augustine, City of God, XXII, 26, p. 1167. “But,
they reply, Porphyry says that in order to be happy the soul must flee the body
[ut beata sit anima, corpus esse omne fugiendum].” See also “Sermon 241,” §7:
“Porphyry has said and written in these latter days: everything bodily must be
fled. Everything bodily, he said, as if every body was for the soul simply dolorous
chains.” See also Thomas Aquinas, De potentia, Q. 5, 10, resp.: “As St. Augustine
said, Porphyry thinks that, for the perfect beatitude of the human soul, it would
be necessary to flee from everything bodily [omne corpus fugiendum esse].”
2. See E. von Ivanka, Plato christianus, 62–80.
3. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics,
respectively, vol. 2, Clerical Styles, 79; and vol. 1: Seeing the Form, 401 (citing
Paul Claudel, Sensation du divin).
4. Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1, p. 410.
5. Michel Henry, Incarnation (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 15. The single mention
of these two authors in the work (§24) is symptomatic of such a realization.
Regarding the limitations of the interpretation of these two Fathers, which, I
suggest, loses corporeity in an unbridled auto-affectivity, see my contribution
already cited, “Y a-t-il une chair sans corps? Autour de l’ouvrage de M. Henry,
Incarnation.”
6. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, IV, 20, 7, p. 649: “gloria enim Dei vivens homo,
vita autem hominis visio Dei.” For the Latin, I refer to the edited volumes of
Sources chrétiennes: book 1 (vols. 263 and 264), book 2 (vols. 293–94), book 3
(vols. 210–11), book 4 (vol. 100), book 5 (vols. 152–53). Page numbers in paren-
theses are to these editions. For the Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching
(henceforth DA), I utilize vol. 406 of the Sources chrétiennes.
7. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, III, 22, 3 (385).
8. See, respectively, Irenaeus, Against Heresies, IV, 20, 7 (474); Against Her-
esies, IV, 6, 5–6 (421); Against Heresies, III, 21, 10 (382).
9. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, III, 22, 4 (385–86).
11. I cannot further develop this conception of immanence as a “byproduct”
of transcendence, but see my work Metamorphosis of Finitude, §5, pp. 16–19.
12. Irenaeus, DA §11 (99).
13. I borrow these terms from Jean-Louis Chrétien, Lueur du secret (Paris:
L’Herne, 1985), 92–104.
14. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V, 1, 1 (570).
15. Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Ark of Speech, trans. Andrew Brown (London:
Routledge, 2004), 2.
16. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §16, pp. 38–39.
17. Mark the Ascetic, cited by X. Lacroix, Le corps de chair (Paris: Cerf, 1994),
236.
18. Jean-Louis Chrétien, Saint Augustine ou les actes de parole (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 2002).
19. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V, 15, 3 (615). For the image of the “potter” and
“surgeon” see Against Heresies, IV, 39, 2 (556). On the meaning of this “amorous
plasmatio” see B. Sesboüé, Tout récapituler dans le Christ: Christologie et sotéri-
ologie d’Irénée de Lyon (Paris: Desclée, 2000), 146–48.
20. Irenaeus, DA §32 (129).
21. Ibid.
22. Charles Péguy, Victor-Marie, Comte Hugo, in Oeuvres en prose complètes
(Paris: La Pléiade, 1992), 235. See my article, “Charles Péguy: Incarnation philos-
ophique et incarnation théologique: Une histoire arrivée à la chair et à la terre,”
L’amitié Charles Péguy 102 (April-June 2003): 164–78. The proximity between
Irenaeus and Péguy remains to be investigated, as if the second had drawn almost
everything from the first, although it hardly needs mentioning that the texts of
Irenaeus were rediscovered at the cusp of the twentieth century.
23. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, III 16, 6 (352). I invert the formula “according
to the Father’s good pleasure” in order to make the “plasmatio” of the Word to
Adam more apparent, an act which performs his very incarnation. On this point,
see Ysabel de Andia, Homo vivens: Incorruptibilité et divinisation de l’homme
selon Irénée de Lyon (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1986), 154–58. See also G.
Ruiz, “L’enfance d’Adam selon saint Irénée de Lyon,” Bulletin de littérature ecclé-
siastique 89/2 (1988): 97–115.
24. I borrow this expression from Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess, 96: “the taking
of flesh is where I am taken.”
25. Irenaeus, DA §32 (129).
26. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, III, 22, 3 (385). Noteworthy is Irenaeus’s insis-
tence on the prefiguration of Adam in this sense rather than the fall. Such does
not negate the second to the profit of the first, but rather, as we will see below,
the fall is only properly understood by virtue of the prefiguration. There are thus
two possible readings of the parallel between the two Adams in Romans 5:12–21,
either with emphasis on the fall (Augustine) or the prefiguration of the Incarna-
tion in the creation of Adam (Irenaeus).
27. Irenaeus, DA 11 (99).
28. Henri Bergson, “The Two Sources of Morality and Religion,” in Key Writ-
ings, ed. John Mullarkey (London: Continuum, 2002), 307.
29. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, IV, 20, 1 (469). See the parallel in IV, 7, 4 (425).
30. See J. Mambrino, “Les deux mains de Dieu dans l’oeuvre de saint Irénée,”
Nouvelle revue théologique 59 (1957): 355–70. See also B. Sesboüé, Tout récapit-
uler dans le Christ, ch. 8, pp. 183–99.
31. Irenaeus, DA 5 (91).
32. See Ysabel de Andia, Homo vivens, p. 67. She notes further the attribution
to the Father of the “will” or “decision” to create, to the Son, the “execution” or
“formation” of created things, and to the Spirit the “perfection” or “ordination”
of creatures to God.
34. Ibid., V, 1, 3 (572).
35. Ibid., IV, 39, 2 (556). For the interpretation of Irenaeus in the context of
“theological aesthetics,” as distinguished from the simple “aesthetic theology,”
cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1: Seeing the Form, 79–
117. See also my article “Hans Urs von Balthasar, lecteur d’Irénée ou la chair
retrouvée,” in Nouvelle revue théologique 115 (September-October 1993): note
5, 683–98.
36. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, 159.
37. Ibid. “The philosophy of this faith can of course assure us that all of God’s
creative activity is to be thought of as different from the action of a craftsman
[Handwerker].”
38. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, bk. 2, chap. 18, 2.
39. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk. 2, chap. 3, 2 and chap.
16, 7: “The divine power is the very substance of God . . . God is the act itself
[Deus autem est actus ipse], not a being in act [non ens actu] by means of an act
that is other than him . . . God’s act is not an action which necessitates its recep-
tion in a patient: his action is his substance [sua actio est sua substantia]. In order
to produce an effect, he does not therefore require subjacent material.”
40. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 170–72. This perspective on
creation as “work” is developed in my Saint Bonaventure et l’entrée de Dieu en
theologie, 81–104.
41. [Reversing the order to fit with the reference above. The French has:
“l’Esprit ‘gouverne’ . . . et que le Fils ‘fait voir’ en guise des deux mains du Pere.”
–Trans.]
42. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V, 16, 1 (617). There are of course multiple
references to the work of Heidegger here, attempting to reverse his philosophy
against himself. What is true of the work of art is first true of the creation, estab-
lishing the Creator or artist (artifex) as the paradigm of all aesthetic work. For
the “hand” see Didier Franck, Heidegger et le problème de l’espace (Paris: Min-
uit, 1986), ch. 8, pp. 91–103. See also Jean-François Courtine, Heidegger et la
phénoménologie (Paris: Vrin, 1990), pp. 283–303. For the different modalities of
being-in-the-world (zuhanden, vorhanden, Da-sein) cf. Being and Time, §12. For
the distinction between “knowing or understanding” (verstehen) and “welcoming
or receiving” (lesen) see Heidegger’s “Lectures on Parmenides,” in What is Called
Thinking?, Lecture VIII, pp. 194–207. Finally, for man (or God?) as the “shep-
herd of being” see the famous passage in the “Letter on a Humanism,” in Basic
Writings, p. 221: “The essential grandeur of man assuredly does not rest in the
fact that he is the substance of being . . . Man is the shepherd of Being.”
44. Ibid., V, 15, 4 (616).
45. Ibid., V, 15, 3 (615).
46. Ibid., V, 15, 4 (616–17).
47. Respectively, ibid., II, 13, 3 (174); IV, pref. 4 (405); V, 8, 2 (588).
48. See A. Rousseau referring to Irenaeus in the first appendix to his translation
of Démonstration de la prédication apostolique, Sources chrétiennes, vol. 406,
pp. 358–59.
49. The formulation of “man as such” of Irenaeus can be further explored by
my “man tout court” in both Le passeur de Gethsémani (Paris: Cerf, 199), 12,
and Metamorphosis of Finitude, 55.
50. Retrieved and commented on by Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V, 7, 2

(586–87).
51. Saint Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. Edmund Hill (New
York: New City, 2002), L. III, 20, 30, p. 234: “after saying to our image, he
immediately added, and let him have authority over the fishes of the sea and the
flying things of heaven and of the other animals which lack reason, giving us to
understand, evidently, that it was in the very factor in which he surpasses non-
rational animate beings that man was made to God’s image. That, of course, is
reason itself, or mind or intelligence or whatever other word it may more suitably
be named by.”
53. Ibid., V, 9, 2 (592)—on the two component parts of a “living man” in order
thereby to ground the famous Against Heresies, IV, 20.
54. Ibid., V, pref. (568).
55. I follow here the reading of A. Rousseau (DA, app. 1) explicitly taking posi-
tion against Henri de Lubac, who insists too strongly on the Pauline trichotomy,
thereby losing the weight of the body/soul couple yet given to the book of Genesis
of body and breath: “We say bluntly on this point [of the Pauline trichotomy],
the thought of Irenaeus does not appear to me to have been presented correctly
by the eminent author [Henri de Lubac]” (357). See Henri de Lubac, Theology
in History (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1996), 117–200. Should we thus say that
“the gifts Christ carried to Adam” were not necessarily “in germ” in order only
to take on the “work of restoration,” but that they are “brought in a better way
in Christ, comparatively to the original situation of Adam and then taking on a
new step in the completion of man” (Fantino, L’homme image de Dieu chez saint
Irénée de Lyon [Paris: Cerf, 1986], 165)? This is not so sure. It is certainly fitting
to think a “transfiguration” (transfiguratio) or a “metamorphosis” of the Word
and of all creation in him by the resurrection. But this more of the Spirit is not
“superadded” purely and simply to the human composite. In Péguy, for example,
the “insertion” of the eternal in the temporal is for the sake of a mutual taking
part of the eternal and temporal. See Charles Péguy, Victor-Marie, Comte Hugo,
in Oeuvres en proses complètes, 236 : “Seen from this side, the incarnation, this
cardinal insertion, appears as a reception, a welcoming, even as a contemplation
of the Eternal in the flesh.” The rejection of the hypothesis of the “plus ajoute” of
the Holy Spirit by virtue of the sole “profound unity that Irenaeus finds between
creation and salvation” appears at the very least insufficient (Sesbouë, Tout réca-
pituler dans le Christ, op. cit., n. 18, p. 88). One’s fidelity to de Lubac is not
enough to maintain his projection of the supernatural into the Irenaean corpus,
no more than the resurrection as “restoration of the lost likeness” is self-evident
in the hermeneutic of the texts of the bishop of Lyon.
57. Ibid., V 18, 2 (623). Concerning the Spirit (pneuma), not as an original
element of the tripartite nature of man, but as the Holy Spirit given by God, see
A. Rousseau, DA, app. 1, p. 360: “Irenaeus understand the verse of St. Paul (1
Thess. 5:23) as relating to the gift of the Spirit to man and not an element of man
as such. It would be necessary to wait until Origen (Entretien avec Héraclide,
Sources chrétiennes, vol. 67, pp. 68–71) for the Spirit (pneuma) to be understood
as an element of the human as such.”

59. Ibid., IV, 20, 4 (471).
60. Charles Péguy, L’argent suite, in Oeuvres en prose complètes, 955.
62. Rousseau, DA, app. I, pp. 357–58.
64. For this doublet of icon-idol and its necessary deployment in a Dionysian
(rather than Irenaean) perspective, see Jean-Luc Marion, The Idol and Distance,
1–8, as well as God without Being, 7–24.
65. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, IV, 6, 6 (421).
66. Ibid., IV, 6, 6 (421) and IV 6, 5 (421).
67. Sesboüé, Tout récapituler dans le Christ, 115.
68. Beyond this invocation of Balthasar, and such is the meaning I intend here,
the French phenomenologists of our day who have worked in aesthetics have
most often elected the invisibility of abstraction over the visibility of the figural:
Malevich for Emmanuel Martineau, Kandinsky for Michel Henry, Rothko for
Jean-Luc Marion, and so on. The properly “figural” meaning of the Incarnation
of Christ in Irenaeus will thus serve to nourish the debate, less, perhaps, in order
to overcome it than in order to assume a distinct position within it.
69. C. Grenier, “La revanche de l’image,” Communio 25, no. 4 (July-August
2003): 37–53. For further illustration of this revenge of the image over the icon
in contemporary art, as well as an assessment of its meaning, see Grenier’s L’art
contemporain: Est-il chrétien? (Paris: Jacqueline Chambon, 1999), 107–15. A
similar reaction is found from the side of aesthetic philosophy rather than from
art criticism, in G. Hébert, “Expérience picturale et phénoménologie française:
La déhiscence du visible,” in Subjectivité et transcendance: Hommage à Pierre
Colin, ed. Philippe Capelle (Paris: Cerf, 2001), 189: “Does non-figurative paint-
ing bear the exorbitant privilege of being the sole place where the dehiscence
of the visible can be enacted? Allow me to think that the price to pay is too
steep.”
70. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris: Seuil, 2002),
12 and 19 (see Francis Bacon’s interview, L’art de l’impossible: Entretiens avec
David Sylvester).
71. See Rousseau, DA, app. II, p. 365: “Image and likeness are correlative
terms, to the point of being interchangeable.” There is one exception: Irenaeus,
Against Heresies, V, 6, 1.
72. I quickly draw out here the consequences of the double observation rapidly
unfolded by A.-G. Hamman, L’homme image de Dieu (Paris: Desclée, 1987), 66–
69: “For Irenaeus the image always involves the fashioned flesh, the plasma. It
receives the image (imago) once and for all because it constitutes its very being . . .
The word never designates the soul . . . The progressive assimilation to the like-
ness (similitudo) is the work of the Spirit (pneuma), the other hand which forms
[the soul] of man (psychê).”
73. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, II, 23, 1 (220).
74. See Jean-Paul Sartre, L’imagination (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1983), 1–4. I borrow the example of the statue in order to represent the thought
of Irenaeus from Rousseau, DA, app. II, p. 367.
75. Irenaeus, DA 22 (115).
76. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, IV, 6, 4 (420). The formula of course approx-
imates Heidegger’s definition of the phenomenon in Being and Time §7:
“Phenomenology means apophainesthia ta phainomena: disclosing starting from
itself what is shown such that it is shown starting from itself.”
77. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, IV, 17, 6 (460). For a fine analysis of this “lit-
eral” status of the image as “figurative” see J. Fantino, L’homme image de Dieu
chez saint Irénée de Lyon, 94–95.
79. Plato, Republic, 515b, Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D. S.
Hutchinson (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1997), 1133: “Don’t you think they’d sup-
pose that the names they used applied to the things they see passing before them?”
80. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, IV, 39, 2 (556). Again, for the interpretation of
Irenaeus in the context of a “theological aesthetics” in contrast to an “aesthetic
theology,” see Balthasar’s monograph on Irenaeus in his The Glory of the Lord,
vol. 2: Clerical Styles, 31–94.
82. I warn the visitor to Chartres, for I speak from experience: nothing that I
describe here can be seen without the aid of an experienced guide, pointing it out
to everyone who still cannot see it in broad daylight. In order to see it without
displacing the reader from here to the cathedral, I recommend the beautiful book
of A. Prache, Chartres: Le portail de la sagesse (Paris: Mame, 1994).
83. In contrast to Saint Irenaeus, Saint Augustine considers the sin of Adam
and Eve to be found in taking “figuratively” the word of the serpent (“if you eat
of it, you will surely not die”), which it was necessary to take “literally.” Here sin
is not only an act but also an intention, or better a manner of reading or a mode
of interpretation—which is not without consequences in the context of a possible
hermeneutical rereading of the meaning of the fall. See St. Augustine, The Literal
Meaning of Genesis, bk. XI, 30, 39, pp. 451–52: “Finally not content with the
serpent’s words she inspected the tree herself, and saw that it was good for eating
and fine to look at (Gen. 3:6), and not believing that she could die from it, she
assumed, in my opinion, that God’s words, if you take a bite of it you shall die
the death, were not to be taken literally, but had some other meaning. And that
is why she took some of its fruit and had a bite, and also gave it to her husband
with her, maybe with a word of encouragement which Scripture does not men-
tion, leaving it understood.”
85. Ibid., IV, 14, 1 (446). The impossibility of comparison with Thomist and
Scotist soteriology by virtue of the gap between “necessary reasons” and “the
reason of fittingness” has been particularly well noted by B. Sesboüé, Tout réca-
pituler dans le Christ, 146–47.
86. Ibid., IV, 14, 2 (447). I refer here of course to the phenomenological cat-
egories of Jean-Luc Marion, in order to make the figure of Adam in his flesh
the “adonné” on which is “projected” the donation of the father. See Jean-Luc
Marion, Being Given, §26.
88. Ibid., V, 14, 1 (608).
89. Ibid., IV, Praef., 4 (405).
90. Ibid., V, 16, 2 (618).

91. Saint Augustine, Confessions, book VIII, 12, 29, trans. Maria Boulding
(Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City, 1997), 206–7: “Suddenly I heard a voice from a
house nearby—perhaps a voice of a boy or girl, I do not know—singing over
and over again, ‘Pick it up and read, pick it up and read.’ . . . Stung into action,
I returned to the place where Alypius was sitting, for on leaving it I had put
down there the book of the apostle’s letters. I snatched it up, opened it and read
in silence the passage on which my eyes first alighted: Not in dissipation and
drunkenness, nor in debauchery or lewdness, nor in arguing or jealousy; but put
on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh or the gratification
of your desires.”
93. Ibid., III, 37, 4 (548).
94. The implicit reference to Levinas ought to be obvious where ethics defined
as “metaphysics” makes the ontological structure of alterity the most basic place
of its constitution. See Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 79: “The estab-
lishing of this primacy of the ethical, that is, of the relation of man to man . . . is
one of the objectives of the present work. . . . Metaphysics is enacted in ethical
relations” (emphasis added).
95. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, IV 37, 7 (550) and IV, 38, 1 (551), respectively.
96. See my work, Le passeur de Gethsémani, 47–54.
98. See Heidegger, Being and Time, §50, p. 232: “Angst about death must not
be confused with fear of one’s demise.”
100. Ibid.
101. Ibid., V, 3, 2 (576–7).
102. Ibid., V, 6, 2 (585) continues: “Our bodies ought to be resurrected, not by
virtue of their substance, but by the power of God.”
103. Ibid.
104. Ibid., IV, 20, 2 (470). This text is heavily commented on by Balthasar and
arguably constitutes the ultimate source of his “theological aesthetics.” See The
Glory of the Lord, vol. 2, Clerical Styles, 55–70.
106. Ibid., V, 36, 3 (679).
107. See ibid., III, 19, 6 (370), for the “sign of Emmanuel,” and III, 20, 1 (370–
2) for the “sign of Jonah.” See A. Antoine, “Le signe de Jonas: Comment dire la
résurrection? Réflexion sur L’Adversus Haereses d’Irénée de Lyon,” Communio
22, nos. 2–3 (March-June 1997): 165–83.
108. Saint Augustine, Confessions, bk. II, 4, 9, pp. 67–68. “We took enormous
quantities, not to feast on ourselves but perhaps to throw to the pigs; we did eat
a few, but that was not our motive: we derived pleasure from the deed simply
because it was forbidden. . . . Enable my heart to tell you now what it was seeking
in this action which made me bad for no reason, in which there was no motive
for my malice except malice.”
110. Saint Augustine, Confessions, bk. III, 11, 20, p. 90.
Chapter 5
1. Tertullian, La résurrection des morts [On the Resurrection of the Dead (De
resurrectione carnis)] (Paris DDB, 1980), II, 5, p. 43. [Unless otherwise specified,
references are to the French editions utilized—and often modified—by the author.
–Trans.] For De resurrectione carnis and De carne Christi I use the Sources chré-
tiennes edition, vol. 216 (and 217 for the notes) (Paris: Cerf, 1975).
2. J. Alexandre, Une chair pour la gloire: L’anthropologie réaliste et mystique
de Tertullien (Paris: Beauchesne, 2001), n. 1, p. 165.
3. See respectively, Tertullian, De resurrectione carnis, IX, 2–3, p. 55; and Ire-
naeus, Adv. Haer. V, 6, 1 (582).
4. Tertullian, De carne Christi, I, p. 211.
5. Heidegger, Being and Time, §7, p. 24; Husserl, Ideas I, §132, p. 316.
6. Quintillian, De institutione oratoria, III, 6, 1–6; and Tertullian, Adversus
Marcionem, bk. 1, XVII, 1; Tertullian, Adversus Praxean V, 1 (cited in note 12 of
§ 2 of De carne Christi, Sources chrétiennes, vol. II, p. 321).
7. Tertullian, De carne Christi, I, 2, p. 211.
8. Tertullian, De resurrectione carnis, II, 3, p. 43.
9. For example, see B. Sesboüé, Jésus-Christ dans la tradition de l’Eglise (Paris:
Desclée, 1990), 73: “The arguments (of Irenaeus, Tertullian and later, of Origen)
surprise us by their realism.”
10. Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem, I, 24, 5, cited in R. Braun, Deus chris-
tianorum: Recherches sur le vocabulaire doctrinal de Tertullien (Paris: Etudes
Augustiniennes, 1977), 301.
11. Tertullian, De carne Christi, XXII, 6, p. 301.
12. Ibid., XV, 2, p. 275.
13. See J.-P. Mahé’s introduction to De resurrectione carnis (La resurrection
des morts), trans. Madeleine Moreau (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1980), 15; F.-M.
Sagnard, La gnose valentinienne et le témoignage de saint Irénée (Paris: Vrin,
1947), II, 1, chap. 7, pp. 295–333.
14. Tertullian, De carne Christi, XIX, 5, p. 291.
15. Charles Péguy, Dialogue de l’histoire et l’âme charnelle, in Gethsémani
(Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1992), 55.
16. Tertullian, De carne Christi, XX, 1, p. 291.
17. Ibid., XXII, 6, p. 301.
18. Ibid., XIII, 4, p. 267.
19. Ibid., X, 1, pp. 255–57.
20. Ibid., XI, 1, p. 259.
21. Ibid.
22. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1968), 147.
23. Tertullian, De carne Christi, XII, 2, p. 263.
24. Ibid., I, 3, p. 213.
25. Ibid., VI, 3, p. 235.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., I, 1, p. 211.
28. Ibid., V, 9, p. 231.
29. Ibid., XVIII, 7, p. 287.
30. Ibid., X, 3, p. 257.

32. Paul Claudel, Sensation du divin, in Présence et prophétie (Fribourg: Eg
loff, 1942), 55, 58.
33. Tertullian, Adversus Praxeas (Tertullian’s Treatise Against Praxeas) (Lon-
don: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1948), XXIX, 3, pp. 128/178.
Compare with the double affirmation and distinction of the suffering of the
Father and that of the Son, in Jorgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, 243.
34. Tertullian, De carne Christi, IV, 2, p. 223.
35. Ibid., IV, 3, p. 223.
37. Tertullian, De carne Christi, IV, 3, p. 225.
38. For the conception of the “access to the world through the flesh of another”
and “the interlacing of flesh” see, respectively, Franck, Chair et corps, 150–51;
and Didier Franck, Heidegger et le problème de l’espace (Paris: Minuit, 1986),
97.
39. Tertullian, De carne Christi, VIII, 5–6, p. 251.
40. Ibid., VI, 3, p. 235.
41. Ibid., IX, 7–8, p. 255.
42. See Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 112–70.
43. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §§44–47, pp. 92–105.
44. Charles Péguy, Victor-Marie, Comte Hugo, 236. For the neologism of
“encharnement” (enfleshment), see Péguy, Le porche du mystère de la deuxième
vertu (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 74.
45. Tertullian, De carne Christi, IX, 3, p. 253.
46. Ibid., IX, 4, p. 253.
47. Husserl, Crisis, §28, p. 108. For the ultimate reduction to the flesh in the
Cartesian Meditations, see the famous §44 of the fifth meditation, pp. 92–99.
48. Tertullian, De carne Christi, IX, 4, p. 253.
49. Tertullian, De resurrectione carnis, IX, 2–3, p. 55.
50. Husserl, Ideas II, § 36, p. 152.
52. See B. Sesboüé, Le Dieu du salut (Paris: Desclée, 1994), 201.
53. Tertullian, De carne Christi, XIII, 4, p. 267.
54. Ibid., XII, 1, p. 261.
55. Ibid., XII, 6, p. 265.
56. See supra.
58. Ibid.
59. It is probably in this sense that we can best understand the meaning of
Jean-Luc Marion’s remark where, before providing an egological interpretation
of the Pauline formula, he first emphasizes that “it is appropriate to thematize . . .
the life of Christ as a spiritual fact.” See “A propos de Réduction et donation,
Réponses à quelques questions,” in Revue de métaphysique et de morale (January-
March, 1991): 75.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid., XII, 2, p. 263.
64. Ibid., XII, 6, p. 265.

65. Ibid., XII, 3, p. 263.
66. Michel Henry, Incarnation: Une philosophie de la chair, §24, pp. 180–88.
68. Ibid. It should be understood that I agree with the interpretation of Tertul-
lian that Henry gives in Incarnation. If we can certainly hold that “the flesh is
life auto-affected in the Son by the Father” (and here we would depend more on
Irenaeus than Tertullian), the density and solidity of the flesh is such in Tertullian
that it is related also to the “body” and not only to the lived experience of the
flesh. One would be surprised to find Gnostic leanings in an author who relies
on the most virulent of anti-Gnostic thinkers to develop his theses (see §24)! On
this very point see my text, with Henry’s response, “Y a-t-il une chair sans corps?
Autour de l’ouvrage de M. Henry, Incarnation.”
69. Tertullian, De carne Christi, XX, 1, p. 291.
70. Ibid., XX, 5, p. 293.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid., XX, 6, p. 295. The reader would have taken note here of a Merleau-
Pontian interpretation of Tertullian’s description of the interlacing of flesh in the
act of birth. On such intercorporeity, interlacing of flesh or the chiasm, see Mau-
rice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 130–55.
74. Tertullian, De carne Christi, VI, 6, p. 237.
75. Ibid., VI, 6–7, p. 237. On the highest degree of Heideggerian certitude of
the “sum moribundus” relative to the Cartesian “cogito ergo sum,” see Martin
Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), §34, pp. 312–13.
77. Edmund Husserl, Husserliana, vol. 14, p. 77 (quoted in Franck, Chair et
corps, 98, n. 25). On the usage of this collection of concepts in Husserl, see Nata-
lie Depraz’s establishment of a terminological development in Transcendance et
incarnation: Le statut de l’intersubjectivité comme altérité à soi chez Husserl
(Paris: Vrin, 1995), 344–45.
79. On the “disincarnated” meaning, at least in part, of the anguish of death
in Heidegger (especially in Being and Time), see Didier Franck, Heidegger et le
problème de l’espace, chap. V, pp. 65–80, esp. 76–78.
81. Tertullian, De resurrectione carnis, XVIII, 9 and 11, pp. 69–70.
82. Tertullian, De carne Christi, V, 1, p. 227.
83. Ibid., V, 5, p. 229.
84. Ibid.
85. On the meaning and deformation of the “credo quia ineptum” into the
“credo quia absurdum,” see J.-P. Mahé, De carne Christi, vol. 2, Sources chré-
tiennes, vol. 217, p. 339.
86. On this point, particularly the distinction between anguish of sin and
anguish of finitude, see my work, Le passeur de Gethsémani, Angoisse, souffrance
et mort, 23–46 and 47–54.
87. Tertullian, De carne Christi, V, 1, p. 227.
88. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 7: The New Testa-
ment, trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989), 142.
89. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §16, pp. 38–39. This statement is the
leitmotif of this second part of the present volume, concerned with the flesh,
announced above, at the opening of the chapter on Irenaeus.
90. See Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, 230.
91. Tertullian, De resurrectione carnis, VIII, 2, p. 54.
92. Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction (Grand Rapids, Mich:
Eerdmans, 1979).
93. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 147.
Chapter 6
1. On this point see my work, Saint Bonaventure et l’entrée de Dieu en
théologie: La Somme théologique de Breviloquium (prologue et première par-
tie) (Paris: Vrin, 2000). The present study, centered on the question of the flesh
(Breviloquium IV, on the incarnation, and V, on grace) will therefore bring to
completion my first essay, based principally on God’s entrance into theology as
Trinity (Breviloquium I). The doctrine of the conversion of the senses, following
upon the Trinitarian a priori, constitute, as I see it, the second part of Bonaven-
ture’s great originality beyond his contemporaries (and Aquinas in particular!).
Concerning the purely thematic filiation of Bonaventure from the first church
fathers and Irenaeus in particular, see J. Plagnieux, “Aux sources de la doctrine
bonaventurienne sur l’état originel de l’homme: Influence de saint Augustin ou
de saint Irénée,” in S. Bonaventura, 1274–1974 (Rome: Collegio S. Bonaventura,
1974), vol. 4, pp. 311–28.
2. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1: Seeing the Form,
367–68.
3. Paul Claudel, Sensation du divin, in Présence et prophétie.
4. Bonaventure, Sermon on the Nativity 2, in Opera Omnia (Quaracchi, 1882–
1902), vol. 9, p. 106.
5. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781), p. 93 (B75, A51).
6. Rupert of Deutz, De vita vere apostolica, IV, 4, and IV, 6 (cited in M.-D.
Chenu, Introduction a l’étude de saint Thomas d’Aquin [Paris: Vrin, 1950], 39).
7. Saint Francis of Assisi, Sacrum commercium, in T. Desbonnets and D.
Vorreux, Documents, écrits et premières biographies (Éd. franciscaines, 1968),
1309.
8. Bonaventure, Life of Saint Francis (Legenda maior) III, 1 (Paris: Éd. francis-
caines, 1968), 38.
9. Ibid.
10. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and Invisible, 147.
11. Bonaventure, Life of Saint Francis III, 3, p. 39.
12. Ibid., II, 4, pp. 32–3.
13. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 78.
14. Bonaventure, Life of St. Francis II, 4, p. 33.
15. See A. Lacau St. Guily, Grünewald: Le retable d’Issenheim (Tournai:
Mame, 1996), 119: “This outrageous brutality by which torture and death are
represented, this fascination with the decomposition of the body, tied to the dread
of sin and the drama of fear, antagonizes sensibility, electrifies ordinary devotion
which gives pleasure to this “physical” approach to the final drama of the Incar-
nation, for which the Crucifixion of Issenheim is an intolerable and distressing
vision” (emphasis added).
16. Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, 89.
17. Saint Francis, Canticle of Brother Son, Francis and Clare: The Complete
Works (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist, 1982), 37.
18. Bonaventure, Life of St. Francis VIII, 6, p. 92.
19. Plato, Timaeus, 51a, Plato: Complete Works, 1255.
20. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Saint Francis of Assisi (Peabody, Mass.: Hen-
drickson, 2008), 68.
21. Bonaventure, I Sent., d. 34, a. 1, q. 4, concl. (I 594 a). Regarding this pas-
sage, see my work, Saint Bonaventure et l’entrée de Dieu en théologie, 71–75 (for
the break with Denys), and 165–84 (for the usage of metaphor).
22. Saint Francis, Canticle, 37.
23. Bonaventure, Les six jours de la creation [The Six Days of Creation] (Paris:
Cerf, 1991), XIII, 12, pp. 307–8. See my Saint Bonaventure et l’entrée de Dieu
en théologie, 179.
24. Respectively, Saint Bonaventure, Breviloquium II, 4 (Paris: Éd. francis-
caines, 1968), 75; and Edmund Husserl, “The Original Ark, the Earth, Does Not
Move (Manuscript D 17),” in Husserl: Shorter Works, ed. Peter McCormick and
Frederick A. Elliston (South Bend, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1981),
222–23. See in particular 230: “Every being in general only has being-sense by
virtue of my constitutive genesis and this has an ‘earthly’ precedence.”
25. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964),
respectively, 9 (on science’s renunciation of dwelling in things), 16 (on the “tran-
substantiation” of painting and painter), and 31 (on the inversion of vision).
26. Paul Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” in Herme-
neutics and the Human Sciences, trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, Eng.:
Cambridge University Press, 1981), 112.
27. Jean-René Bouchet, Saint Dominique (Paris: Cerf, 1988), 78–79.
28. G. Bedouelle, Saint Dominique ou la grâce de la parole (Paris: Fayard-
Mame, 1982), 117–25 and 264, from the liturgy of Saint Dominic: “Light of the
Church, Doctor of truth, model of patience and purity, give us in abundance this
wisdom that you have so generously distributed—you, the Preacher of grace.”
29. Letter of approval of the order in 1215 by Bishop Folques of Toulouse, in
M. H. Vicaire, Saint Dominique: La vie apostolique (Paris: Cerf, 1965), 151–52.
30. Jordan of Saxony, Libellus de principiis ordinis praedicatorum, translated
into French by M. H. Vicaire, in Saint Dominique et ses frères: Évangile ou crois-
ade? (Paris: Cerf, 1967), §10, pp. 53–54.
31. Bedouelle, Saint Dominique ou la grâce de la parole, 170.
32. Jordan of Saxony, Libellus, §15, p. 56.
33. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, IIa–IIae, q. 188, art. 4, resp.
34. Paul Ricoeur, “Philosophical and Biblical Hermeneutics,” in From Text to
Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thomp-
son (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 95.
35. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae IIa–IIae q. 187, a. 3 resp.
36. Ibid., IIa–IIae q. 181, a. 3, resp.
37. Ibid., IIa–IIae q. 188, a. 6, resp.
38. Paul Ricoeur, “Preface to Bultmann,” in Essays on Biblical Interpretation,

ed. Lewis Seymour Mudge (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 1980), 68.
39. These well-known categories of énoncé and énonciation inherited from
Ferdinand Saussure can be found in Émile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique
générale (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), vol. 2, pp. 215–29.
40. Bonaventure, Breviloquium, II, 11, p. 118. The references to the books of
scripture and the world are drawn from Hugh of Saint Victor, De sacramentis
I, 6, 5, and will be completed in his sermon Unus est magister noster Christus,
translated into French as Le Christ maître (Paris: Vrin, 1990), §14, p. 45: “These
two modes of contemplation and intelligence (the interior sense in the contempla-
tion of divinity and the exterior sense in the contemplation of humanity) are also
signified by the interior and exterior readings of the book which is written inside
and outside [per lectionem interiorem et exteriorem libri scripti intus et foris] and
about which it is said in the Apocalypse: ‘I see in the right hand of the one seated
on the throne a book written inside and outside [librum scriptum intus et foris]
and sealed with seven seals’ (Rev. 5:1).”
41. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 2: Clerical Styles, 263.
42. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 88.
43. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum [Journey of the Mind to God] I,
7, p. 35. Page numbers of the Itinerarium are to the Vrin French edition, Itinéraire
de l’esprit vers Dieu (Paris: Vrin, 1960).
44. E. Ortigues, Le discours et le symbole (Paris: Aubier, 1962), 65.
45. Bonaventure, Itenerarium, I, 9, p. 35 (V, 298).
46. Trophime Mouiren, in Saint Bonaventure, Breviloquium II, Le monde créa-
ture de Dieu (Paris: Éd. franciscaines), “Introduction,” p. 26.
47. Denys the Areopagite, Mystical Theology III, 1033B, in Pseudo-Dionysius,
The Complete Works, 139.
48. Bonaventure, Itinerarium, I, 5, p. 31.
49. Ibid., I, 13–14, p. 39: “The sensible world elevates us to the consideration
of God in his power, wisdom and goodness . . . This consideration can also extend
to the (seven) modes of being of creatures [conditionem creaturarum] which thus
render a (sevenfold) testimony [testimonium] to the power of God, his wisdom
and goodness.”
50. See, respectively, Saint Augustine, De Trinitate XI, I, 1; and Saint Bonaven-
ture, II Sententiae 16, 1, 2, fund. 4 (Quaracchi, vol. II, p. 397). On this break
between Augustine and Bonaventure, see Etienne Gilson, The Philosophy of St.
Bonaventure, trans. Dom Illtyd Trethowan and Frank J. Sheed (New York: St.
Anthony’s Guild, 1965), chap. 7, pp. 184–85.
51. Augustine, Confessions VII, IX, 14, p. 170.
52. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 2, Clerical Styles, p.
261. For the Trinitarian view of the world and the creative Trinity, see my work,
Saint Bonaventure et l’entrée de Dieu en théologie, §11, pp. 150–64.
53. Maurice Blanchot, “The Secret of the Golem,” in The Book to Come, trans.
Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 86–91. With-
out citing Maurice Blanchot, one can find a philosophical critique of the reduction
of the symbol to the sole “sign of recognition” in A. Séguy-Duclot, “Qu’est-ce
qu’un symbole,” Philosophie 57 (1998): 79–92, as well as a theological critique in
R. Scholtus, “Sacrement, symbole, événement,” Études 3774 (1992): 389–96. As
for the development, however classical, of sacramental theology, under the single
auspice of “recognition,” see L.-M. Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, trans. Patrick
Madigan and Madeleine Beaumont (Collegeville, Minn.: Pueblo, 1995), 111–28.
54. Bonaventure, Itinerarium, I, 4, p. 31. For Duméry, see n. 1, p. 33.
55. Hugh of Saint Victor, De diebus triebus, Patrologia Latina, 176, 814 B.
56. Bonaventure, Hexaemeron XIII, 12 (Quarrachi V, 390), pp. 307–8 [page
numbers are to the French edition, Les six jours de la création (Paris: Desclée,
1991)]. The link between hermeneutics and descriptive phenomenology needs to
be deepened in a study (presently in course) centered on the status of the book in
Hugh of Saint-Victor.
57. Falque, Saint Bonaventure et l’entrée de Dieu en théologie, §12, pp. 163–83.
58. Bonaventure, Unus est magister noster Christus, Le Christ maître (Paris:
Vrin, 1990), §14, p. 45.
59. Bonaventure, Breviloquium V (Paris: Éd. franciscaines, 1968), V, 6 (Quar-
rachi V, 260), pp. 74–75.
60. Ibid.: “This contemplation exists in the prophets by a triple revelation,
corporeal, imaginative and intellectual; in other righteous people it begins
in speculation which commences in the senses and comes to the imagination,
passing from the imagination to reason, reason to the understanding, and the
understanding to the intellect, intellect to wisdom or knowledge by excess [ad
sapientiam sive notitiam excessivam] which commences in this life and is realized
in eternal glory.”
61. Bonaventure, Life of Saint Francis, p. 30 (Quaracchi VIII, 508).
62. Bonaventure, Breviloquium V, 6, pp. 74–75.
63. Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 2, Clerical Styles, 323.
64. Bonaventure, De reductione artium ad theologiam, II, 10 (Quaracchi V,
322); Les six lumières de la connaissance humaine (Paris: Éd. franciscaines,
1971), 68–69.
65. Bonaventure, Itinerarium, IV, 3, p. 75.
66. Bonaventure, De reductione, II, 9, p. 67: “Each sense, in fact, exercises
its activity on a proper object, and avoids what is harmful and does not appro-
priate what is foreign; thus [per hoc modum] the sense of the heart leads a
well-regulated life when it acts in relation to its proper object in such a way as to
avoid negligence, etc.”
67. Ibid.
68. Bonaventure, referring to Aristotle, Breviloquium II, 11, p. 117: “There has
been given to man a twofold sense [duplex sensus], interior and exterior, pertain-
ing to spirit [mentis] and flesh [carnis].” See Aristotle, De anima, III, 3, 429 a: “We
define imagination [phantasia] as a movement engendered by sensation in act.”
69. Bonaventure, resp. Itinerarium, II, 2, and II, 1, p. 45.
70. Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 2: Clerical Styles, 321.
71. Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1: Seeing the Form, 423.
72. Bonaventure, Breviloquium V, VI, 6, pp. 73–75.
73. Karl Rahner, “The Doctrine of the Spiritual Senses in the Middle Ages,” in
Theological Investigations, vol. 16, trans. David Morland (New York: Seabury,
1979), 104–34.
74. Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1: Seeing the Form, 424 (emphasis
added).
75. For the use of these concepts, see, of course, Emmanuel Levinas, Totality
and Infinity, 33–35.
76. Bonaventure, Soliliquium VIII, 33–35, in Valentin-Marie Breton, Saint
Bonaventure (Paris: Aubier, 1943), §3, 12–18, 288–92.
77. Bonaventure, Breviloquium V, I, 3, p. 31.
79. Ibid., vol. 1: Seeing the Form, 425.
80. I evoke here Stanislas Breton, Deux mystiques de l’excès: J.-J. Surin et
Maître Eckhart (Paris: Cerf, 1985), chap. 3, pp. 167–91. On this point see my
contribution, “De la préposition à la proposition: Mystique et philosophie chez
Stanislas Breton,” Transversalites 99 (2006): 17–36.
81. Bonaventure, Itinerarium, I, 3, p. 29, and I, 9, p. 35. On the meaning of
this passage in Bonaventure, see A. Menard, “Le transitus dans l’oeuvre de saint
Bonaventure, un itinéraire de conversion biblique et de conformation progressive
au Christ pascal,” Laurentianum 41, no. 3 (2000): 379–412.
82. Bonaventure, Itinerarium, p. 47.
83. See Plato, Theatetus, 194 b-195 b; Aristotle, De Anima II, 12, 424 a, 17–25.
84. Bonaventure, De perfectione vitae ad sorores, in Valentin Marie Breton,
Saint Bonaventure (Paris: Aubier, 1943), 196–97.
85. Bonaventure, De Hexaemeron, I, 19, p. 112: “The center of the macrocosm
is the sun; the center of the microcosm is the heart.”
86. Ibid., I, 11, p. 106.
87. Bonaventure, Vitis mystica, III, 5 (Quaracchi VIII, 164). Translated in
Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 2: Clerical Styles, 333.
89. Marc Richier, “Communauté, société et histoire,” in Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, Phénoménologie et expérience, ed. Marc Richier and Etienne Tassin
(Grenoble, Fr.: Millon, 1992), 8.
90. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 144. Concerning the
imperative of description in order to return to the “things themselves,” see
Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, ix: Phenomenology “is a matter
of describing, not of explaining or analyzing. Husserl’s first directive to phenom-
enology, in its early stages, to be a ‘descriptive psychology’ or to ‘return to the
things themselves,’ is from the start a forswear of science.”
91. On this complex enigma of the fourth term that I cannot develop here,
see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” in Signs, 168;
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 79.
92. Bonaventure, Vitis mystica, III, 5 (Quaracchi, VIII, 164).
93. Bonaventure, Breviloquium V, 6, p. 75.
95. Bonaventure, “De Triplica Via,” III, 3 (Quaracchi, VIII, 14), trans. in Breton,
Saint Bonaventure, 139.
96. Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1: Seeing the Form, 319.
97. See L. Belos, Giotto à Assise (Assise: Casa Editrice Francescana, 1989), 6:
“The twenty-eight histories (painted by Giotto around 1270) are drawn from the
Legenda maior of St. Bonaventure as the sole ‘orthodox’ narration of the life of
the saint.” For the stigmata scene see pp. 66–67.
98. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum, prologue, 2–3, pp. 21–23.
99. See Rémi Brague, “Un modèle médiéval de la subjectivité: La chair,” in

Ibn Rochd, Maïmonide, Saint Thomas d’Aquin, Colloque de Cordoue, 8–10 mai
1992, 36–62, esp. 42–45.
100. Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 2: Clerical Styles, 273 (emphasis
added).
101. Bonaventure, “De perfectione vitae ad sorores,” VI, 11, trans. in Breton,
Saint Bonaventure, 203.
102. Bonaventure, Hexaemeron, XXII, 23, p. 479.
103. Bonaventure, II Sententiae 1, II, 3, 2; translated in Balthasar, The Glory of
the Lord, vol. 2: Clerical Styles, 315–16.
104. Bonaventure, Breviloquium VII, p. 93 and p. 113.
105. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits,
trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
§98, p. 334.
107. Bonaventure, Sermones de tempore, Serm. II, pars 2, p. 107 (Quaracchi,
IX, 106–10). An exemplary French translation of this sermon, moreover, for the
question of the flesh that preoccupies us here, can be found in Études francis-
caines 27 (1977): 84–90 (quotation from 86).
108. Bonaventure, Sermones de tempore 2, p. 88.
109. Ibid.
110. Ibid., p. 87.
111. Bonaventure, De reductione, §26, p. 85.
112. Bonaventure, Itinerarium, I, 15, p. 43.
Introduction to Part Three

1. F. Laupies, Leçon philosophique sur autrui (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1999), 3: “Reflection on the other is late: ancient and medieval thought
ignore this question.” Yet the author exhibits some appropriate reserve: “In this
context, patristic and medieval authors can be of great assistance: the fact of not
having thought the question of otherness as such does not prevent, despite every-
thing, a real sensibility for relation to the other” (7; emphasis added).
2. Saint Augustine, Confessions X, 27, 38, p. 262.
3. Richard of Saint Victor, La Trinité (De Trinitate), in Sources chrétiennes, vol.
63 (Paris: Cerf, 1958), Bk. III, c. 19, 927b, p. 209. On this see my “La condilec-
tion ou le Tiers de l’amour [Richard de Saint-Victor]” in Archivo de Filosofia,
Actes du colloque Enrico Castelli, January, 2006.
4. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 147 (citation from Augustine, De vera reli-
gione 39, 72).
Chapter 7
1. Henri Crouzel, Origène (Paris: Lethielleux, 1984), 318.
2. Paul Ricoeur, À l’école de la phénoménologie (Paris: Vrin, 1993), 217; and
Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §56, pp. 128–31.
3. Origen, Homélies sur le Lévitique VII, 2, in Sources chrétiennes vol. 286,
(Paris: Cerf, 1981), 317.
4. We in fact have to wait until the end of the fourth century for the insertion
of the formula, “credo in communionem sanctorum” to be attested to in the
Apostles Creed (though never in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed). Such a

formula is in any case cited by Nicetas of Remesiana in his Commentary on the
Symbol at the dawn of the fifth century, and repeated by Faustus of Riez (d. 485)
and Caesarius of Arles (d. 542). For a historical investigation of this question
see E. Lamirande, La communion des saints (Paris: Fayard, 1962), 11–20. For
its theological meaning see Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/2 (London: Con-
tinuum, 2004), 614–726, as well as P.-Y. Emery, L’unite des croyants au ciel et sur
la terre (Taizé: Presses de Taizé, 1962), especially chap. 4, pp. 73–84.
5. Edmund Husserl, Philosophie première (1923–1924) (Paris: Presses Univer-
sitaires de France, 1972), vol. 2, lesson 53, p. 175.
6. “L’expérience du propre est le propre de l’expérience.” A formula of Didier
Franck, commenting on §44 of the Cartesian Meditations. See his Chair et corps,
92–93.
7. Origen, Homélies sur Ézéchiel, VI, 6, in Sources chrétiennes vol. 352 (Paris:
Cerf, 1989), 229.
8. Ibid.
9. M. Fédou, La sagesse et le monde: Christologie d’Origène (Paris: Desclée,
1995), 325.
10. Heidegger, Being and Time, §29, pp. 126–31.
11. Origen, Homélies sur Ézéchiel VI, 6, p. 229.
12. Ibid., p. 231. See in particular Moltmann’s interpretation of this formula
in The Crucified God, 228. See also F. Varillon, La souffrance de Dieu (Paris:
Centurion, 1975), 46–50.
13. Origen, Homélies sur Ézéchiel, VI, 6, p. 229.
14. M. Fédou, La sagesse et le monde, 327.
15. Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” in Entre Nous (London: Contin-
uum, 2006), 80. I have attempted to push to its limits the hypothesis of divine
passivity in my Le passeur de Gethsémani, Angoisse, souffrance et mort, chap. 9,
pp. 123–39.
16. The insistence on the pathos of the cross in the Origenist perspective ought
not to lead us to forget the pathos of joy that is common to the Father and Son:
“Imagine God’s joy when the impure becomes chaste, when the unjust practices
justice, when the impious becomes religious! The conversion of every man is
cause for great feasting in God” (Origen, Homélie sur les nombres, XXIII, 2, in
Sources chrétiennes, vol. 29 [Paris: Cerf, 1953], 426).
18. See Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §§50–55, pp. 108–28.
19. Ibid., §49, p. 107.
20. Origen, Homélies sur Ézéchiel, VI, 6, pp. 229–31.
21. Origen, Commentaire sur l’évangile selon Mathieu, X, 23, in Sources chré-
tiennes vol. 162, (Paris: Cerf, 1970), 259.
22. According to the translation of agapê (o theos agapê estin) by caritas (Deus
caritas est) in the Vulgate.
25. Origen, Homélies sur Lévitique, VII, 2, pp. 309–23.
26. William of Saint-Thierry, Première vie de saint Bernard, in Oeuvres com-
plètes de saint Bernard (Vivès, 1873), vol. 8, XII, 59, pp. 40–41.
27. Here I reproduce in modified form a passage from my article, “Expérience

et empathie chez Bernard de Clairvaux,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et
théologiques (October-December 2005): 655–96.
28. Bernard of Clairvaux, Traité de l’amour de Dieu (De Diligendo Deo), in
Sources chrétiennes, vol. 393 (Paris: Cerf, 1993), 129.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., p. 131.
31. See Meister Eckhart, On Detachment, 49–52: “Detachment [Abgeschie-
denheit] is being deprived of all creatures . . . It is so close to nothing that between
perfect detachment and nothing there is nothing between them.”
32. Étienne Gilson, La théologie mystique de saint Bernard (Paris: Vrin, 1947),
151. The famous exegete adds, as if highlighting the break with Eckhart: “Every
difficulty that one believes to be found in the texts of St. Bernard on this point are
reduced to a misinterpretation, because the soul which is loosened and detached
from itself, even to the point of renouncing what it is, on the contrary is estab-
lished in its proper substance as the divine love changes it” (emphasis added).
33. See my work, Metamorphosis of Finitude, chap. 5, 62–80. The meaning of
the resurrection as transformation is well articulated by G. de Stexhe in his exege-
sis of the same passage from Bernard, “Entre le piège et l’abime,” in Qu’est-ce que
Dieu: Hommage à l’abbé Daniel Coppieters de Gibson (1929–1983) (Brussels:
Facultés Universitaires de Saint-Louis, 1985), 415–54, esp. 445–49: “Eschatology
does not mean the abolition of the body, but its transfiguring resurrection . . . It
is only by being fully assumed in its finite and therefore bodily condition that
man can approach the glory that is promised him in the fourth degree of love.
What is called glory here is the full integration of the body in the very dyna-
mism of the will released from all possessive fixation on the self” (emphasis in
original).
34. Bernard of Clairvaux, De Diligendo Deo, 133.
35. On the philosophical debate concerning “affective fusion” in T. Lipps, see
Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, 18–36. One can also read with profit on
this topic Edith Stein’s dissertation, Zum Problem der Einfühlung.
36. Bernard of Clairvaux, De Diligendo Deo, 133. By contrast to the Sources
chrétiennes translation, I translate “substantia” as human nature (nature
humaine) and not “substance” (substance) in order to avoid a too substantialist
and metaphysical reading of Bernard.
37. Ibid., p. 131.
38. Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, 15.
39. De Diligendo Deo, 133. On this play of “affection” and “deification” see
the pertinent analyses of Jean Leclercq to which I am indebted here, Maurice
Blondel lecteur de Bernard de Clairvaux (Brussels: Lessius, 2001), 83–93 and
especially 84–85. For the theme of the “transfer of fluxes” in Husserl, a cen-
tral aspect of human intersubjectivity, and—I suggest—mystical empathy, see
Edmund Husserl, Zür Phänomenologie de Intersubjektivität, in Husserliana 15
(1929–35), § 43. This passage has been commented on by Natalie Depraz, Tran-
scendance et incarnation: Le statut de l’intersubjectivité comme altérité à soi chez
Husserl (Paris: Vrin, 1995), §20, pp. 251–59.
40. If Bernard had in his hands Origen’s Commentary on the Canticle at least
during his encounter with William of Saint-Thierry in the infirmary of Clairvaux,
there is no proof that he had access to the Homilies on Ezekiel, in any case less
available in the medieval world. See J.-P. Bouhot, “La bibliothèque de Clairvaux,”
in Oeuvres complètes de saint Bernard de Clairvaux, in Sources chrétiennes, vol.
380 (Paris: Cerf, 1992), 141–53. See also P. Verdeyen’s note, “Une théologie de
l’expérience,” in Sources chrétiennes, vol. 380, 564–72.
41. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons sur le canticle, in Sources chrétiennes, vol.
431 (Paris: Cerf, 1978), 289.
42. Such is a misguided objection often addressed to medieval philosophy. As
an example, see Hans Jonas, Le concept de Dieu après Auschwitz (Paris: Rivages
poche, 1994), 27–28: “We are not in a position to maintain the traditional (medi-
eval) doctrine of an absolute divine power without limit.” On this point see my
response in Le passeur de Gethsémani, 87–95.
43. Bernard of Clairvaux, De la considération (De consideratione) (Paris: Louis
Vivès, 1866), vol. 2, V, VII, 17, p. 179.
44. E. Housset, L’intelligence de la pitié: Phénoménologie de la communauté
(Paris: Cerf, 2003), 153. Despite his compelling analysis, it is surprising that he
makes no mention of Bernard of Clairvaux, who is probably even more apt to
sustain this thesis than Origen or William of Saint-Thierry, both of whom he
cites. See my work, Metamorphosis of Finitude, §17, pp. 67–75, where Bernard
serves as a corrective to Origen on this point.
45. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons sur le Canticle, 281.
46. Ibid., 283.
47. I return to this theme in Le passeur de Gethsémani, part 3.
48. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons sur le Canticle, 289. On the conversion of
the affectus in the affectio operated by the resurrection as “transformation,” see
Metamorphosis of Finitude, part 2.
49. Origen, Homélies sur Lévitique, 191. For further elucidation of this
interpretation of the hemorrhaging woman, see my Le passeur de Gethsémani,
147–53. This interpretation of Origen himself was absent from that book, though
its solely phenomenological reading of the story accords completely with and is
confirmed by our study here of Origen.
50. Origen, Homélies sur Lévitique, 191.
51. Ibid.
55. I make, of course, an implicit reference here to the famous “touching-
t ouched” experience developed by Husserl in Ideas II § 36 and Merleau-Ponty in
a number of places, for example, Phenomenology of Perception, 368, Signs, 168,
and The Visible and Invisible, 133.
56. Origen, Homélies sur Lévitique, 81. A detailed analysis of these modes of
“toucher origenien” can be found in F. Bertrand, Mystique de Jesus chez Origene
(Paris: Aubier, 1951), 49–142: (1) searching for Jesus, (2) approaching Jesus, (3)
welcoming Jesus, (4) following Jesus, (5) contact with the Savior. A phenomeno-
logical reading of these diverse modes of divine-human touching is yet to be done.
57. The French neologism forged by Péguy (“encharnement”) has no English
equivalent. See his Le porche du mystère de la deuxième vertu, 74.
59. Fedou, La sagesse et la monde, 416. “The doctrine of the ‘preexistence of

souls’ ought to be understood as the ‘unique exception’ to all the false condemna-
tions of Origen’s teaching.” Let me express my debt to this work. Renewing and
structuring the interpretation of Origen, it has served as the “touchstone” for a
localization and development of crucial points of his thought.
60. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 147. “We must not think
the flesh starting from substances, from body and spirit—for then it would be
the union of contradictories—but we must think it, as we said, as the concrete
emblem of a general manner of being.”
61. Origen, Against Celsus, in Sources chrétiennes vol. 138 (Paris: Cerf, 1967),
207.
63. On the impossible division of terrestrial and celestial worlds, drawn pre-
cisely from Origen himself, see again my Metamorphosis of Finitude, chap. 7, pp.
95–111.
64. Henri de Lubac, History and Spirit (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2007),
385–426.
66. Ibid.
67. Jean-Luc Nancy, La communauté désœuvrée (Paris: Christian Bourgeois
Éditeurs, 1986), 202.
68. “The most touching pages in the Homilies on Leviticus.” M. Borret,
“Introduction aux homélies sur le Lévitique d’Origène,” in Origen, Homélies sur
Lévitique, 32.
69. Paul Ricoeur, A l’école de la phénoménologie, 216–17.
71. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, n. 266 [B. 553/L. 919], ed. Léon Brunschvicg (Paris:
Garnier-Flammarion, 1976), 198: “Jésus sera en agonie jusqu’à la fin du monde:
il ne faut pas dormir pendant ce temps-là.” For the meaning of “common texture”
in the constitution of a visible unity of bodies and the world, see Merleau-Ponty,
The Visible and Invisible, 142.
72. Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man
(1938; San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988), 127.
74. Ibid., resp. pp. 313 and 317.
75. Origen, Homilies on Jeremiah, XIV, 7, in Sources chrétiennes, vol. 238
(Paris: Cerf, 1977), 81.
76. Fedou, La sagesse et le monde, 354.
77. Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/2: The Doctrine of Reconciliation (London:
Continuum, 2004), 17–18.
78. See respectively Husserl, Cartesian Mediations, §56, pp. 128– 31; and
Ricoeur, À l’école de la phénoménologie, 217.
79. Ricoeur, À l’école de la phénomenologie, 217.
81. Ibid.
82. For the etymology of communio sanctorum as com-munis and not cum-
unio, see J.-M. R. Tillard, “Communion,” in Dictionnaire critique de théologie,
ed. Jean-Yves Lacoste (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), 236.
83. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 215.

84. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (New York: HarperCollins, 1954), 35.
“In the spiritual community there exists no direct relation among those who
share in it . . . Christ stands between me and others.”
85. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Dialogue and the Perception of the Other,” in
The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neil (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univer-
sity Press, 1973), chap. 5, pp. 131–145. See esp. 185–86. On the impossibility of
the repetition of the Levinasian perspective in Christianity, see my Le passeur de
Gethsémani, 167–69, as well as the accurate remarks of Jean-Luc Marion’s essay
in homage to Levinas, “The Intentionality of Love,” in Prolegomena to Charity,
trans. Stephen E. Lewis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 91–120,
esp. 113–20.
86. Origen, Homélies sur Hom. Lev., p. 315. An interpretation of 1 Cor.
15:23–8.
87. Cited by Origen, ibid.
88. On this point see the illuminating reflections of H. Crouzel, Origène, pp.
331–41, esp. 332.
91. Ibid., §16, pp. 38–39.
92. Origen, Homélies sur Lévitique, 321–23.
94. Husserl, Logical Investigations, 111; and Husserl, Ideas I, 362.
95. See Jean-Louis Chrétien, “Le langage des anges selon la scholastique,” in
La voix nue (Paris: Minuit, 1990), 81–98.
Chapter 8
1. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Ia, q. 75, a. 7, resp. and ad. 2.
2. Ibid., Ia., q. 51, a. 2, ad. 1.
3. Ibid., resp.
4. Ibid., Ia., q. 113, a. 4, resp.
5. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom, trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore, Md.:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 89.
6. Wim Wenders, Les ailes du désir (Wings of Desire) (Paris: Flammarion,
1987), 23.
7. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Ia, q. 63, a. 2, resp.
8. Wenders, Wings of Desire, 23.
9. Rainer-Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, second and fifth elegy (passages cited
and commented on by J.-F. Angelloz, Rilke [Paris: Mercure, 1952], 314).
10. Rudolph Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writ-
ings, trans. Schubert M. Ogden (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 1984), 4.
11. Christian Ducoq, “Satan, symbole ou réalité?” Lumière et vie 78 (May-
August 1966): 105.
12. Henri Corbin, “L’evangile de Barnabe,” La foi prophétique et le sacre: Cahiers
de l’Universite Saint-Jean de Jerusalem 3 (1977). See 170–72 in particular for the
accusations waged against Saint Paul and the doctrine of consubsantiality. See also
Corbin’s “Necessite de l’angelologie,” L’ange et l’homme: Cahiers de l’hermetisme
3 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1978), 44: “Perhaps there is a correlation between the fact
that Islamic theosophy has always refused the idea of homoousios of Nicaean
Christology, and the fact that [Islamic theosophy] has so well assured, both onto-
logically and gnoseologically, the world of the Angel and of angelophanies.”
13. See René Descartes, Conversation with Burman, trans. John Cottingham
(New York: Clarendon, 1976), 18.
14. Ibid.
16. Ibid., Ia, q. 58, a. 6, resp. See Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis,
IV, 29, 46, On Genesis, trans. Edmund Hill, O. P. and John Rotelle (Hyde Park,
N.Y.: New City, 2002), 268–69.
18. Ibid., Ia, q. 50, a. 4.
19. René Descartes, Rules for the Direction of Our Native Intelligence (Regu-
lae ad directionem ingenii), in Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings, trans.
John Cottingham et al. (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 4.
This is repeated in the second Meditation (Meditations on First Philosophy, trans.
Donald A. Cress [Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1993], 64): “I know with evidence
that there is nothing easier for me to know than my mind.”
20. The perpetuation of such an ideal of the transparency of angelology in
phenomenology is moreover also noted by Jean-Louis Chrétien, for whom the
decline of angelic language remains the vanishing point and the criterion that
“human language does not cease to have as a horizon.” See Chrétien, La voix
nue, 98.
22. For this debate see Thomas Aquinas, De veritate, q. 8, a. 7 (as well as the
explanatory note on the opuscule on the angels of the Somme théologique, Édi-
tions des jeunes [Paris: Cerf, 1963], n. 48, p. 399).
23. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Ia, q. 56, a. 2.
24. Ibid., Ia, q. 56, a. 2, resp.
25. Ibid., Ia, q. 56, a. 2, ad. 3.
26. Ibid., Ia, q. 56, a. 2, resp.
27. Ibid., Ia, q. 56, a. 2, ad. 3.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., Ia, q. 56, a. 2, ad. 2.
30. Ibid., Ia, q. 56, a. 2, a. 3, resp.
31. Ibid., Ia, q. 56, a. 2, ad. 2.
32. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §50, p. 111. It is Paul Ricoeur who first
exchanges “la chair autre” (other flesh) for “autre organisme” (other organism)
in his À l’école de la phenomenology, 207.
33. Henry Denzinger, The Sources of Catholic Dogma (Fitzwilliam, N.H.:
Loreto, 2002), Lateran IV, number 428.
35. Ibid.
36. Tertullian, De carne Christi, VI, 5, in Sources chrétiennes, vol. 216, pp.
235–36.
37. Origen, Peri Archôn, Praef. 8, in Sources chrétiennes, vol. 252, p. 87.
38. Ibid., I, 6, 4, p. 207.
39. Saint Augustine, Sermon 362, para. 17, in Patrologia Latina, vol. 39, ed.
J.-P. Migne (Paris: Apud Garnier fratres, 1865), 1622.
40. Franck, Chair et corps.
41. Saint Augustine, De Trinitate, III, 1, 5, pp. 129–30.
42. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 2, Inv. 6, app. §5, p. 341: “One will call
‘phenomena’ all the lived experiences in the unity of the lived experience of an I:
phenomenology signifies then the theory of lived experiences in general.”
43. Ibid.
45. Supra.
46. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Ia, q. 51, a. 2, ad. 1.
47. Descartes, Conversation with Burman, 19.
49. Wenders, Les ailes du désir, 25.
50. Pierre Boutang, preface to J.-M. Vernier, Les anges chez Thomas d’Aquin,
vol. 3 (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Latines, 1986), 14.
51. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Ia, q. 57, a. 2, obj. 2.
52. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §§53–55, pp. 116–28.
53. See Jean-Louis Chrétien, “Le langage des anges selon la scolastique,” in La
voix nue, 81–98: “Before being considered to be something much more perfect
in the angel than in man, language is like a perfection that it would be necessary
also to attribute to the angel” (87).
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid., Ia, q. 113, a. 4, resp.
57. Ibid., Ia, q. 113, a. 6, resp.
58. See Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate, q. 8, a. 2.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid.
62. This hypothesis of an angelic accompaniment to the kenotic movement
of the Word, though not Thomist, is developed by Hans Urs von Balthasar,
Theo-Drama, vol. 3: Persons in Christ, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco:
Ignatius, 1992), chap. 4, pp. 465–504.
63. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Ia, q. 57, a. 2, ad. 3.
65. Ibid., §50, p. 111.
66. Ibid., §55, p. 124.
67. Ibid., §55, p. 125.
68. Ibid., §55, p. 121.
69. Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. 3: Persons in Christ, 490.
70. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 47.
Chapter 9
1. Etienne Gilson, Jean Duns Scot: Introduction à ses positions fondamentales
(Paris: Vrin, 1952), 446.
2. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 298–99.
3. Marion, Prolegomena to Charity, 93 (emphasis in original). Marion returns

to this theme of haecceity developed in the context of alterity in Being Given, 258
and 324. See also Emmanuel Levinas, Positivité et transcendence, suivi de “Levi-
nas et la phenomenologie,” ed. Jean-Luc Marion (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 2000), 301–4.
4. Text of Plato commented on by Heidegger in What Is a Thing? trans. W. B.
Barton Jr. and Vera Detsch (South Bend, Ind.: Gateway Editions, 1967), 3.
5. Ibid., 1–5.
6. Ibid., 9.
7. Martin Heidegger, Traité des catégories et de la signification chez Duns Scot
(1916; Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 78–79.
8. Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert
Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collins, 1971), 169.
9. Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, trans. Mark Raftery-
Skehan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 105.
10. Independently of every suspicion of atheism in Duns Scotus, we can note
that the Subtle Doctor was probably the first to promote in the history of phi-
losophy, if not the nonexistence of God, at least a God who is not first lovable
by virtue of his existence. See Olivier Boulnois, “Si Dieu n’existait pas, faudrait-il
l’inventer? Situation métaphysique de l’éthique scotiste,” Philosophie 61 (March
1999): 50–74. He quotes Scotus on 56: “If, impossibly, another God was posed,
who had not created us, and who ought not to be glorified by us, he would still
be, in an absolute manner, sovereignly lovable by us” (Duns Scotus, Reportata
pariensa, III, d. 27, q. un., n. 6). It should be noted, however, that it is less a
question of the “nonexistence of God,” whom it would be necessary to invent—
despite the force of the hypothesis, pp. 55–56—than it is of the existence “of
another God” (alius Deus), neither creator, nor glorifier, nor lovable by us. Per-
haps it is therefore too much to affirm that “the hypothesis of a nonexistent God
can be found rooted in Duns Scotus at the beginning of the fourteenth century.”
At best he is posed as “another existent” or rather another essence—these are
always identified in Scotus.
11. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Ath-
lone), 35.
12. For the translation and explication of univocity as “destruction” or rather
“superposition” of Thomist analogy, let the reader consult Olivier Boulnois’s intro-
duction to, translation of, and commentary on Duns Scotus, Sur la connaissance
de Dieu et l’univocité de l’étant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988).
13. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, I, d. 3, q. 2, §26. For the works of Duns Scotus, I
use both the Ordinatio (vols. I–VII) and Lectura (vols. XVI–XIX) of the Vatican
Balic edition (1950). For the Reportata pariensa, I use the Éditions Vivès, vols.
XXIII–XXIV (as well as vol. XV for Book III of the Ordinatio). I have also refer-
enced the Tractatus de Primo Principio, ed. E. Roche (New York: Louvain, 1949).
14. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, I, d. 3, q. 2, §27, p. 94 [unless otherwise noted,
page numbers are to the French edition of Scotus’s Ordinatio in Boulnois, Sur la
connaissance de Dieu et l’univocité d’étant–Trans.].
15. Here I resume, with some modification and accommodation, the suggestive
but very precise exposé of Jean-Luc Marion, “Une époque de la métaphysique,”
in Jean Duns Scot ou la révolution subtile, ed. Ch. Goémé (Paris: FAC Éditions,
1982), 87–95. See also Olivier Boulnois’s introduction to Scotus’s Sur la connais-
sance for a thorough examination.
16. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, prol., part 1, §1. I modify here G. Sondag’s
French translation of the prologue of the Ordinatio (Jean Duns Scot, prologue de
l’Ordinatio [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999], 35), for his translation
of ens inquantum ens as “being as being” [être en tant qu’être] completely loses
Scotus’s break of usage with Aristotle and Aquinas.
17. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, IV, d. 13, q. 1 (cited and commented on by Mar-
ion, Révolution subtile, 89).
18. Ibid., I, d. 3, p. 1, q. 3, §185, p. 160.
19. Ibid., II, d. 3, q. 1, §38. I follow here Gilson’s translation in Jean Duns Scot,
449, rather than Sondag’s in Le principe d’individuation (Paris: Vrin, 1992), 103,
inasmuch as the former shows more clearly haecceity’s act of standing out from
the community that founds it.
20. On this point see J.-M. Counet, “L’univocité d l’étant et la problématique
de l’infini chez Jean Duns Scotus,” in Actualité de la pensée médiévale, ed. J.
Follon and J. McEvoy (Louvain: Ed. Peeters, 1994), 287–328—a judicious rap-
prochement between Scotus and the meaning of appearing in Sartre.
21. Duns Scotus, Reportatus pariensa, IV, d. 1, q. 1, n. 7 (Vivès, vol. XXIII, p.
535).
22. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, prologue, n. 12, Sondag, Prologue, p. 43.
23. See Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, I, d. 3, p. 3, q. 4. Here he comments on Saint
Augustine: “The mind is the image in the most perfect way, and completely when
these acts of knowledge bring about in him the knowledge of God taken as object,
for then the soul is an expressive similitude of the Trinity.”
24. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt, 1978),
134. See in particular her chapter on “Duns Scotus and the Primacy of the Will,”
which elucidates in a new, or rather modern way, the difficult arguments of the
Subtle Doctor.
25. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, prologue n. 32, p. 59.
26. Olivier Boulnois, Duns Scot: La rigueur de la charité (Paris: Cerf, 1998),
39.
27. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, I, d. 2, q. 1, p. II (ed. Vivès, vol. VIII, 393b–486a).
28. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, prologue, n. 12, p. 43. For the determination of
finitude as such, independently of the linking of finite and infinite, see Martin
Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft, 5th ed.
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), § 39, pp. 146–50. For the pos-
sible theological opening starting precisely from this conception of finitude, see
my Le passeur de Gethsémani, 17–64.
29. Marion, “Une époque de la métaphysique,” 95.
30. Duns Scotus, cited and commented on by Hannah Arendt, The Life of the
Mind, 134–35.
31. See P. Aubenque, La prudence chez Aristote (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1963), 65: “The theory of prudence is therefore attached to a cosmology,
and more profoundly, to an ontology of contingency.”
32. Duns Scotus, Lectura, prologue, n. 111, p. 187. [Unless otherwise specified,
page numbers of the Lectura are to Sondag’s French translation, La théologie
comme science pratique (Paris: Vrin, 1996), p. 187. –Trans.]
33. Duns Scotus, Lectura, prologue, n. 172, p. 209: “It is contingent that a rock
falls, and yet there exist some necessary truths in regard to its act of falling, for
example, that it tends toward the center of the earth and makes a straight line. In
a parallel way, the love of God is contingent, and yet there are necessary truths
involved, for example, I ought to love God above all things.”
34. Husserl, Ideas I, §2, p. 7; Marion, Being Given, 132–34. It is regrettable
that Marion has not made profit of Husserl’s mention of “individual being” in
relation to contingency in order to tie them together in haecceity. This Duns Sco-
tus does magnificently here.
35. Duns Scotus, Reportata pariensa, 3, d. 7, q. 4, n. 4 (L. Veuthey, Jean Duns
Scot: Pensée théologique [Paris: Éd. Franciscaines, 1967], 83).
36. Duns Scotus, Reportata pariensa, 3, d. 7, q. 4, n. 5.
37. Duns Scotus, quoted by Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 134.
38. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, II, d. 3, p. 1, n. 1, translated by Sondag, Le prin-
cipe d’individuation, 87. In this third distinction, two parts are distinguished: the
De principio individuationis (pars prima) and the De cognitione angelorum (pars
secunda). The problem of individuation is posed within a theological context for
Scotus, despite its pertinence to philosophy as such. One must not forget this as
we proceed, for in doing so one would risk reducing individuation to a purely
logical principle.
39. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, I, d. 3, n. 50, p. 258.
40. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1040a 1–2, in The Complete Works of Aristotle,
vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984),
1641. “Clearly there can neither be definition or demonstration of sensible indi-
viduals.” On the relation of Aristotle to individuation, I refer the reader to the
profitable article of B. Pinchard, “Le principe d’individuation dans la tradition
aristotélicienne,” in Le problème de l’individuation., ed. P.-N. Mayaud (Paris:
Vrin, 1991), 27–50, and esp. 37–45 for the Scholastic repetition of Aristotelian
questions.
41. Aristotle, Categories, chap. 5, 2a 10–18, in The Complete Works of Aris-
totle, vol. 1, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1984), 4: “A substance—that which is called a substance most strictly, primarily
and most of all—is that which is neither said of a subject nor in a subject, e.g., the
individual man or the individual horse. The species in which the things primarily
called substances are, are called secondary substances . . . both man and animal.”
42. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, I, d. 3, n. 66, p. 115.
43. Ibid., II, d. 3, q. 1, n. 42. Here I follow Gilson’s exceptional translation of
this passage in Jean Duns Scot, 452.
44. Beyond the famous chapter of Gilson on haecceity in Jean Duns Scot, 444–
46, I direct the reader to Olivier Boulnois’s profitable article, which, depending on
Gilson, elaborates more precisely the historical positions: “Genèse de la théorie
scotiste de l’individuation,” in Mayaud, Le problème de l’individuation, 51–77,
esp. 55–66.
45. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, II, d. 3, p. 1, n. 30. I follow here Sondag’s trans-
lation in Le principe d’individuation, p. 98. See also his brilliant introduction
which leads instructively into some difficult questions.
46. Gilson, Jean Duns Scot, 453.
47. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio I, 3, n. 10, p. 85.
48. Ibid., II, d. 3, p. 1, q. 6, n. 142. See the pertinent comments in Gilson, Jean
Duns Scot, 460; and Boulnois, “Genèse de la théorie scotiste de l’individuation,”
66.
49. For a pedagogical application of the principle of individuation to the
determination and distinction of Socrates and Plato, see G. Sondag, Le principe
d’individuation, 71–72 and n. 2, p. 99.
50. J. Tricot in a note to his French translation of the Metaphysics of Aristotle
(Paris: Vrin, 1981), bk. Zeta, 8, n. 2, p. 393: “The doctrine of individuation by
form . . . will come to rejoin, in the history of thought, the theory of haecceity
(haecceitas) by which Duns Scotus, in reaction to Thomism, sought to recog-
nize in the individual an intelligibility analogous to that of the species. To him
Socratesness appeared to contain as much reality as Humanity, inasmuch as it is
the ultimate actuality of the form.”
51. Gilson, Jean Duns Scot, 464. One will move Scotist haecceity closer to
what is found in Aristotle, book Lambda of the Metaphysics, if, changing the
question of the constitution of individuation (matter- form), one accepts the
deictic—“your” matter, “your” form—the very principle of singularization: “And
those of things in the same species are different, not species, but in the sense that
the causes of different individuals are different, your matter and form and mov-
ing cause being different from mine, while in their universal formula they are the
same” (Aristotle, Metaphysics, bk. Lambda, 5, 1071a 27–9, p. 1692).
52. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, II, 3, p. 1, q. 2, n. 57, p. 112. Regarding the case
of the rock, not only as paradigm of haecceity (hic) but of the production and
comprehension of essences by God, the reader should consult the two famous
exposés of the Subtle Doctor: Ordinatio, I, d. 35, q. un., n. 32, and Lectura, I, d.
26, q. un., n. 23–7.
53. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio II, d. 3, q. 6, n. 164, p. 164.
54. Ibid.
55. Duns Scotus, Treatise on First Principles, I, 1, trans. R. Imbach et al.; Traité
de premier principe, in Cahiers de la revue de philosophie et théologie 10 (Paris:
Vrin, 1983): 43.
56. For the interpretation of Scotus in light of the Thomist “metaphysics of
Exodus,” see Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, trans. A. H. C.
Downs (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 52–54 for the
definition of Christian philosophy as the “metaphysics of exodus.” For the inter-
pretation of the name of God revealed to Moses as ontotheology, see P. Vignaux,
“Mystique, scolastique et exégèse,” Dieu et l’être: Exégèses d’Exode 3, 14 et de
Coran 20, 11–24 (Paris: Centre d’Études de Religions du Livre, Études Augustini-
ennes, 1978), 208: “it does not appear possible to formulate any better the project
of an ontotheology starting from revelation.” See also Vignaux’s study further cen-
tered on a reading of the Ordinatio, “Métaphysique de l’Exode et univocité de
l’être chez Jean Duns Scot,” Celui qui est: Interprétations juives et chrétiennes
d’Exode 3, 14., ed. Alain de Libera and E. Zum Brunn (Paris: Cerf, 1986), 103–26.
57. The “hic” of the haecceity of God is of course absent from the Latin, but at
least contained conceptually in the “qui” of the formula ego sum qui sum.
58. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, prologue, n. 170, p. 225.
59. Aristotle, Metaphysics, bk. Lambda, 7, 1072b 24–5. See p. 1695 “If there-
fore this state of joy that we possess only fleetingly, God possesses constantly, it is
admirable, and if he has it to a greater degree, this is even more admirable.” See
B. Pinchard’s commentary, “Le principe d’individuation dans la tradition aristo-
télicienne,” in Mayaud, Le problème de l’individuation, 34: “This does not mean
that God has this joy because he is less composite and less material than we are,
but because he is more individual” (emphasis added).
60. One can find a sketch of this new Scotist interpretation of Exodus 3:14 by
the motif of singularity, as opposed to the community of being, in J.-M. Counet,
“L’univocité de l’étant et la problématique de l’infini chez Jean Duns Scot,” in
Follon and McEvoy, Actualité de la pensée médiévale, 323: “As a response Moses
receives the manifestation of God as absolute singularity, as the pure singularity
of which the redundant, and thereby virtually superfluous, side is rightly the very
condition of the gratuity of presence and therefore equally the condition of the
possibility of the freedom of those who are called to be situated in relation to it.”
61. The formula is attributed to Duns Scotus and developed by Hannah Arendt,
The Life of the Mind, 104 and 144.
62. Marion, God without Being, 102.
63. Jer. 1:5: “Before I fashioned you in the womb I knew you; before you were
born I set you apart; I am making you a prophet to the nations.”
64. Duns Scotus, Reportatus pariensa, III, d. 27, q. un; ed. Vivès, XXIII, 481.
Cited and commented on by Camille Bérubé, L’amour de Dieu selon Jean Duns
Scot, Porète, Eckhart, Benoît de Candfield et les capucins (Rome: Instituto storico
dei cappuccini, 2001), 194.
65. Bérubé, L’amour de Dieu selon Jean Duns Scot, 161 and 195 (emphasis
added). See also from the same text the profitable studies consecrated to “L’amour
de Dieu selon Jean Duns Scot,” 145–203, and particularly the debate with Veu-
they, “Amour métaphysique et infini selon Léon Veuthey,” 195–98.
66. Duns Scotus, Reportatus pariensa, III, d. 27, q. un. Cited and commented
on by Bérubé, L’amour de Dieu selon Duns Scot, 194.
67. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, III, d. 28, q. un, n. 2. Ed. Vivès, XV, 379a. Cited
and translated by Veuthey, Duns Scot: Pensée théologique, 147.
68. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, III, d. 27, q. un. Ed. Vivès XV 379b. Compare
Veuthey, Duns Scot: Pensée theologique, 147.
69. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, III, d. 27, q. un, n. 2. Ed. Vivès XV 356a ; Veuthey,
Duns Scot: Pensée theologique, 146.
70. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, III, d. 32, q. un, n. 6. See C. Balic’s article “Duns
Scotus,” Dictionnaire de spiritualité (Paris: Beauchesne, 1957), vol. 3, col. 1801–
18 (citation found col. 1806). For the expression “love-donation” when speaking
of charity, see Veuthey, Duns Scot: Pensée theologique, 146. For the Franciscan
determination of God as self-donation to the point of complete abandonment
(the gift of the gift), see my Saint Bonaventure et l’entrée de Dieu en théologie,
141–45.
71. On the meaning of condilectio, see Richard of Saint Victor, De Trinitate:
Sources chrétiennes 63 (Paris: Cerf, 1958), book 3, c. 19, 927b, p. 209; as well as
my article “Dieu charité,” Communio (September-December 2005): 75–87.
72. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, II, d. 3, p. 1, q. 7, n. 251, p. 204.
73. This line is opened by Etienne Gilson and repeated by the majority of
commentators after him. His brilliant chapter on haecceity in Jean Duns Scot
(444–66) remains centered on the question of individuation by matter or form,
without establishing any link with the problem of the intellection of angels that
he previously examined (422–31).
74. Duns Scotus, Ordination, II, d. 3, q. 6, n. 15. See on this point Gilson’s com-
mentary in Jean Duns Scot, 464.
75. Gilson, Jean Duns Scot, 577. Such a love does not seem to be rooted explic-
itly in its theological topos for Gilson, as I just mentioned in a preceding note.
76. P. Doyles, “Scot et la tradition franciscaine,” in Goémé, Duns Scot ou la
révolution subtile, 44.
77. Edgard de Bruyne, Etudes d’esthétique médiévale (Bruges: De Tempel,
1946), vol. 3, pp. 347–70.
78. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, prologue, n. 170, p. 225.
79. For the distinction between theologia tradita and theologa divina, see the
prologue of the Ordinatio, n. 151 and n. 168 (and commentary, p. 178). For the
difference between “the essence as this one [ut haec]” and “this essence” (haec
essentia), see n. 170 (and accompanying commentary, pp. 177–81).
80. [Falque uses Marion’s neologism invisable here, which comes from the
French verb viser, “to aim at” and which signifies “that which cannot be aimed
at or taken within the scope of vision.” See Marion, God without Being, 13–14.
–Trans.]
81. Gilson, commenting on Scotus repeating Aristotle: Jean Duns Scot, 466.
82. E. Bettoni, Duns Scoto filosofo (Milan: Vita e Penserio, 1966), 122. See
also the rigorous discussion of the author with L. Veuthey in E. Bettoni, “The
Originality of the Scotistic Synthesis,” in John Duns Scotus, 1265–1965, ed. J.-K.
Ryan and B.-M. Bonansea, Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy,
vol. 3 (1965), 28–44.
83. Duns Scotus, Quaest. Subt., q. 15, n. 6, p. 438. Cited by Camille Bérubé, La
connaissance de l’individuel au Moyen Age (Montreal, 1964), 158.
84. Duns Scotus, Reportatus pariensa, II, d. 3, §14 (XXII, 595a).
85. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, III, d. 14, n. 5, p. 529.
86. Duns Scotus, Reportatus pariensa, II, d. 3, §15 (XXII, 595b). See Ricoeur,
Oneself as Another, esp. the second study, on the interpretation of the Aristo-
telian phantasm (De anima, III, 3, 428a) in terms of alterity or “apperceptive
transposition” (sicut alia), which is appropriate for Duns Scotus here.
87. Olivier Boulnois, Être et representation: Une généalogie de la métaphy-
sique moderne à l’époque de Duns Scot (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1999), 177. On this triple distinction of the knowledge of God, self, and the other
in Scotus, see the illuminating pages of this work (174–88).
88. Bérubé, L’amour de Dieu, 173–74.
89. William of Ockham, I Sententiae, d. 3, q. 1 and q. 5. Cited by Bérubé,
L’amour de Dieu, 268. On this break, specifically as it concerns the status of
singulars and the genealogy of the problematic itself, see the suggestive essay by
P. Vignaux, “Jean Duns Scot, Guillaume d’Occam,” Philosophie au Moyen Âge:
Lire Duns Scot aujourd’hui (Albeuve, Switz.: Castella, 1987), 180–209.
90. On the break between Scotus and Ockham, see the magisterial pages in P.
Alféri, Guillaume d’Ockham: Le singulier (Paris: Minuit, 1989), §9, pp. 74–88
(citation 82).
91. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 77 (emphasis added).
92. Pascal, Pensées, L. 678/B. 358.
93. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Journal (entry for August 3, 1872), in Poems and
Prose, ed. W. H. Gardner (New York: Penguin Classics, 1985), 126 (emphasis
added). See the introduction to the French version of Hopkins, De l’origine de
la beauté suivi de Poèmes et d’Écrits, trans. René Gallet and J.-P. Augier (Seyssel:
Éd. Comp’Act, 1989), 8: “ ‘Inscape’ or ‘nature’ leads ‘to the heart of the meta-
physics of the singular.’ ” The commentator, Rene Gallot, says, a couple of pages
later: “In Hopkins’s work on beauty, the lights come to us, the vibration or the
clashes of this encounter between human finitude and an infinite singular” (10).
The encounter between Scotus, as we have portrayed him, and his poetic quasi-
t ranslation as it is given in Hopkins, cannot be said any better, perhaps, than that.
94. Hopkins, “Pied Beauty” (1877), in Poems and Prose, 30–31. There is of
course the poem “Duns Scotus’ Oxford” (1879), but there is nothing that speaks
better this haecceitas that this experience of praise to the Father for “pied beauty”
and “dappled things.” Another vantage, no less magisterial, is found with Christ
as the center (and no longer the Father considered as source) in the poem, “As
kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame”: “As kingfishers catch fire, drag-
onflies draw flame / As tumbled over rim in roundy wells / Stones ring; like each
tucked string tells, each hung bell’s / Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad
its name . . . for Christ plays in ten thousand places / Lovely in limbs, and lovely
in eyes not his / To the Father through the features of men’s faces” (in Poems
and Prose, 51). See the beautiful commentary on these poems of René Gallet,
G.-M. Hopkins ou l’excès de la présence (Paris: Fac. Editions, 1984), 82–85 (on
“Pied Beauty”) and 100–101 (for “As kingfishers . . .”). On the relation to the
singular as such in Hopkins, see also Gallet’s “G.-M. Hopkins: L’intensité singu-
lière” in Po&sie 32 (1984): 99–109, and esp. 99–100, for the distinction between
“inscape” and “instress” which I cannot address here. Finally, because the rap-
prochement with Hopkins is imposed by the subject of the haecceity of the other,
see the superb article by Jérôme de Gramont, “Nature, monde, création,” Cahiers
Diderot 4 (1991): 99–122, esp. 116–19, for a commentary on the poems cited
above. I thank these two interpreters of Hopkins, not only for their friendship,
but also for their works, which lead me progressively from the haecceity of Scotus
to the inscape and instress of Hopkins.
Conclusion
1. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 1 [II/1], p. 168: “We absolutely do not
want to be content with ‘simple words,’ a symbolic comprehension of words . . .
We must go back to the things themselves. We desire to render self-evident in
fully fledged intuitions that what is given here in a present abstraction is truly
and really what the significations of words mean in the expression of the law.”
2. See respectively Heidegger, Being and Time, §7, p. 30, and Heidegger, History
of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, §8, pp. 75–79. Concerning the relation
of these two formulas, see Jean-Luc Marion, Reduction and Givenness, 7–49.
Concerning the sliding from Husserl to Heidegger, see Jean-François Courtine,
“Phénoménologie et science de l’être,” in Heidegger et la phénoménologie (Paris:
Vrin, 1990), 189; and Jerome de Gramont, L’entrée en philosophie: Les premiers
mots (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999), 114.
3. On the meaning of this descending movement of the Breviloquium in rela-
tion to the ascending climb of the Itinerarium, see my work Saint Bonaventure et
l’entrée de Dieu en théologie, 24–27. Concerning the preference for the heuristic
path, at least for the finitude of modern man, see my justification in Metamor-
phosis of Finitude, §3, pp. 6–9.
4. I make implicit reference here to Henri de Lubac’s Théologies d’occasion
(Theological Fragments, trans. Rebecca Howell Balinski [San Francisco: Ignatius,
1989]), although in a completely different sense because for him the “théologies
d’occasion” do not involve at all a servitude of theology to some philosophy.
5. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenol-
ogy, §7, p. 17: “We have also become aware in the most general way that human
philosophizing and its results in the whole of man’s existence mean anything but
merely private or otherwise limited cultural goals. Therefore—how can we avoid
it?—we are functionaries of mankind. The quite personal responsibility of our
own true being as philosophers, our inner personal vocation, bears within itself
at the same time the responsibility for the true being of mankind.”
6. See my essay “Tuilage et conversion de la philosophie par la théologie,” in E.
Falque and A. Zielinski, Philosophie et théologie en dialogue, 1996–2006 (Paris:
L’Harmattan), 45–56, esp. 55; as well as my article “Philosophie et théologie:
Nouvelles frontières,” Etudes (February 2006): 201–10.
7. See Didier Franck, Dramatique des phénomènes (Paris: Presses Universita-
ires de France, 2001), 5: “Phenomenology, which was yesterday a conversion, an
adventure, a new freedom of the gaze, is nothing today but a constituted object
simply transmitted, and is henceforth only the amnesiac tradition of an object.
Barely have we come to grasp the audacity of the reduction, and there conceals
a phenomenology become document and monument, a phenomenology deserted
or merely visited.”
8. William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, vol. 4, chap. 4. See O. Boulnois, ed.,
La puissance et son ombre: De Pierre Lombard à Luther (Paris: Aubier, 1994),
131–39.
9. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons sur le Cantique, vol. I, in Sources chrétiennes,
vol. 414 (Paris: Cerf, 1996), Serm. 3, 1, p. 101.
10. See Heidegger, Being and Time, §§3–4, pp. 7–12.
11. Heidegger, “The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism,” 232.
12. Supra.
13. And hence a new work on medieval philosophy will be undertaken under
the title Expérience philosophique et expérience monastique, XIe–XIIe siècles.

God The Flesh and The Other From Irenaeus To Duns Scotus

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God, the Flesh,

and the Other

northwestern university press

English translation copyright © 2015 by Northwestern University Press.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-​­in-​­P ublication Data

Falque, Emmanuel, 1963– author.

Preface (2008) xxi

Preface to the English-​­Language Edition xxiii

Fons Signatus: The Sealed Source 3

Part One. God

Part Two. The Flesh

Part Three. The Other

By Way of Conclusion: Toward an Act of Return 279

Emmanuel Falque, dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Institut

philosophy before entering theological studies itself. Theologians were phi-

questions—­even if, or especially because, their thinking is theological and

carbon copy of his teachers and forebears in the—­forgive me—­philosophical

to receive and even anticipate (however paradoxically) the grace of divine

mort: Lecture existentielle et phénoménologique (1999), Métamorphose de

The work of Tilliette, though less influenced by phenomenology than Ger-

style or risk getting seasick, thereby trusting that their guide—­philosopher-​

William Christian Hackett

(Bonaventure), communion of saints and genesis of the community (Origen),

Is phenomenology a jack-​­of-​­all-​­trades [bonne à tout faire]—­or better, the

The Contradictions of a Practice

aims, phenomenology is not allowed to be annexed by any other discipline,

immanence of what gives itself in phenomenology and the ordinary nature

The Programmatic Relevance of the Middle Ages

of that manifestation that still remains anticipated. Profunda fluviorum scru-

The Stages of a Journey

(quomodo)—­the elucidation of “meaning” through the exposition of “acts,”

The Tree and Its Fruits

The Sealed Source

of a conversion that also provoked a certain return to tradition (Stein)? Has

Phenomenology and Hermeneutics. (a) Firstly, it is certainly clear that phe-

and in order to pass in a new way from phenomenology to medieval philoso-

on the Categories and Signification in John Duns Scotus, 1915), he makes a

Let us be careful: to plead for philosophy the honor of theology is not to

The Onto-​­Theology in Question

without ever doing anything constructive. That the structure of onto-​­theo-​

mode of appearance, by which these phenomena, so essential to philosophy

Metaphysics and Theology in Tension (Augustine)

Transformation of the Categories

The Genius of the Discovery

Toward a Scheme of Non-​­Substantial Unity

Substance or the Danger of Tritheism. Apart from two inversions, in book V

The Accident or the Immutability in Question. The profit from rejecting

immutable eternity (the Father as immutable and incorruptible substance)

The Turn of Discovery

Extraction and Transfer: A Double Operation. Precisely as a discovery, the

The Quest for Another Model

Attempts and Failures to Transform Previous Models. Three inherited

anti-​­Arian interpretation of “Christ the power and wisdom of God” (1 Cor.

The Act of Covering

Bearing in mind the previous failures at the transformation of ancient mod-

The Moment of a Crucial Decision

serious nature of the formulation in the bishop of Hippo.57 According to

The Meaning of a Tension. Again, the hypothesis of a “separate order,”

faith as counterpart to the de-​­hellenization of its content” (Grillmeier) does

The Resistance of Substantialist Ontology

“relative”—­which would be a suppression of “nature” itself. According to

flesh (Irenaeus), its consistency (Tertullian), and its conversion (Bonaven-

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-P ublication Data

Preface to the English-Language Edition xxiii

questions—even if, or especially because, their thinking is theological and

carbon copy of his teachers and forebears in the—forgive me—philosophical

style or risk getting seasick, thereby trusting that their guide—philosopher-

Is phenomenology a jack-of-all-trades [bonne à tout faire]—or better, the

(quomodo)—the elucidation of “meaning” through the exposition of “acts,”

The Onto-Theology in Question

without ever doing anything constructive. That the structure of onto-theo-

Toward a Scheme of Non-Substantial Unity

anti-Arian interpretation of “Christ the power and wisdom of God” (1 Cor.

faith as counterpart to the de-hellenization of its content” (Grillmeier) does

“relative”—which would be a suppression of “nature” itself. According to

with the Other as interlocutor, this relation with an existent—precedes all

From the Apophatic to the Meta-Ontological

The Meta-Ontological: The Impossible Reification

and of God concerning himself (subjective genitive)—no longer only empha-

non-being-ness of his own humanity. On the contrary, he has received it

Erigenian apophantic (the crossing of the manifest [apo-phainesthai]). One is

Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas)—but is a matter instead of a surpassing of

carne]—man entirely assumed [hoc est in toto homine quem accepit]—who

Martha, or the Phenomenological Epochê. The Lord’s response to Martha—

suppression of all intentionality (auto-affectivity).49 It is hardly necessary to

[mystique pathetique]” of Origen (chap. 7)—“detachment” does not have

denounce his accusers. Each case requires careful discernment—not in order

The “transfer of what is one’s own”—the identification of the “ground of